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TIDAL and Brian
A hit of psilocybin creeps up on you gently, like dipping your toes into the ocean at low tide. Venture in deeper and hazy apparitions come into clear form, companions into the deep waters of the unknown. Darkness and light, roots and sky, sadness and joy. It’s a journey celebrated indie rocker Brian Lopez takes you on with his new album TIDAL, a lush, dream-like collection of gorgeously crafted songs that conjure the melodic melancholy of Elliott Smith and Nick Drake and swirling atmospherics of Radiohead’s OK Computer while staying true to his signature desert noir sound. And like any good psychedelic trip, you’ll emerge from TIDAL with a lustrous afterglow, craving more.
Composed at his home in Tucson, Arizona during the pandemic, Lopez let his mind and fingers wander, following ideas wherever they took him. As songs took shape, he asked his friend and XIXA bandmate Gabriel Sullivan to produce the album at their very own Dust and Stone Recording Studio, then came contributions from Calexico drummer John Convertino, KT Tunstall, Black Pumas singer Lauren Cervantes, and a dozen other musical collaborations from friends scattered across the globe, all working remotely.
Throughout the album, Lopez delves into darkness without succumbing to it, masterfully merging heartbreak with hope.
In the album’s first single, ‘3000 Stories’, Lopez combines undulating synths, sweeping guitar tones and soft-sung vocals to reflect on the tragedy of the borderlands close to his home. The song pays homage to the 3,000 unidentified people whose bodies have been found in the desert over the past two decades, imagining what their lives were and could have been. Meanwhile ‘Margot Kidder’ – named after the famed Superman actor – deals with mental health and the perils of fame.
Lopez’s musical lineage – connecting him to Calexico, Giant Sand, DeVotchka, Orkesta Mendoza, and his other musical project as cofounder of XIXA – runs deep in TIDAL. There are the Mexican folk guitars and violins in ‘Like A Virus’, a postcard to a COVID past, reflecting on the aftermath of a prolonged solitude; the mariachi brass and nylon strum of ‘Looking Glass’, an agave-soaked ballad to a love lost; and the descending guitar arpeggios and haunting strings of ‘All Souls’, a tribute to Tucson’s Dia De Los Muertos celebrations and a recently passed friend.
TIDAL glows with brightness too. ‘Magic’, a song Lopez describes as “about as pop as I can be”, and ‘Face To Face’ another “super pop” number that nods to The Crash Test Dummies and the idea that “just going out and spreading love is the best thing we can do.”
Then there's the album closer ‘Psilocybin Dream’. “Feels like I’m floating out to sea” intones Lopez in a distant, spectral vocal, an apt sentiment to open a song that also references the Holy Ghost, becoming a tidal wave, and embracing eternity. A wild, stormy ride, it was inspired by “a very profound mushroom trip” that Lopez experienced during the pandemic.
“It was incredible – transcendent,” he says of the experience. “I witnessed the birth of the universe and watched millions of years of evolution in the form of cacti, mesquite trees, hummingbirds, and lizards all scattered throughout my backyard.” Complete with a searing guitar solo and blazing mariachi trumpets, ‘Psilocybin Dream’ swells to a cacophonous crescendo before slinking away, a few picked notes of acoustic guitar and a final, flourished E-minor chord bringing the song – and the whole trip – to an end.
It's a fitting coda for Lopez’s fourth studio album, and one that proves Tucson’s famed desert romantic has lost none of his sweet magnetism or Southwestern psychedelic tendencies. A sweeping sense of majesty, which Lopez has called “the exotic beauty that’s exclusive to the Sonoran Desert – desolate, desperate, yet gorgeous,” is woven into the very fabric of TIDAL. It gives the record an anchor - and its soul.
