After a round of great success tapping into the more pop-driven side of his artistry on his 2018 EP 25 Years, well-traveled veteran singer, songwriter and self-proclaimed “Troubadour Family Man” Dan Rodriguez is getting back to his Americana soul roots on his upcoming album.
The reflective nature of the upcoming album – and Rodriguez’s decision to self-produce for the first time in his 12 year recording career – stands in stark contrast to the tunes on 25 Years, whose infectious title track Rodriguez calls “the poppiest song I ever did.” That EP was engineered and produced by prolific pop producer John Fields, whose star-studded resume includes Ben Rector, Pink, Miley Cyrus, Jonas Brothers, Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez. As much as he enjoyed the experience of working with Fields, Rodriguez no longer wants to “write in that direction,” and his current material is more in line with a more Americana, rootsy vibe.
Today Glide is excited to premiere his rollicking new single “Passenger,” a song that offers an honest assessment of where he’s been and where he’s headed personally and professionally at age 35. With its mix of bright acoustic acoustic strumming and dramatic, sweeping twang, the song finds Rodriguez offering a slightly humorous yet pointed and introspective look at the good and bad choices he has made in his life, taking stock and confronting those angels and demons – with an eye towards committing to being a better person. Rodriguez hones in on a feeling we can all relate to as we enter the more adult phase of our lives, reflecting on where we’ve been and where we are going. Backed by tight instrumentation, Rodriguez turns these feelings into an infectious country-tinged Americana anthem that speaks to universal themes.
“Passenger” (PRE-ORDER) is the lead single of a still-in-progress project that will include the release of an EP later this spring and an eventual full-length album. Tracks on the Passenger EP will include the singer’s recent COVID inspired single “Together Again”; the autobiographical, richly detailed “The Older I Get The Less I Know,” which casts fresh eyes on growing up in a large, churchgoing family whose friends “walked a different road”; and two other songs, “Slow Down” and “Poor Me.” Several songs that will appear on the full LP, most prominently “Troubadour Family Man,” address the challenges of being both a hard working traveling musician (138 shows in 2019!), and a husband and a father of two young boys, Oak and Alder.
Listen to the track and read our chat with Rodriguez below…
What inspired you to write this song? What is it about?
We all battle with balancing different things in our lives. I’ve found myself balancing the angel and devil, the right or wrong, the selfish or selfless throughout my life. And this song is about any of the times that we’ve tipped the scales in the wrong direction and found ourselves on a destructive path. This song is bringing awareness to those moments and hopefully learning from them.
This song visits the push-and-pull that mistakes cause in our lives. Is this song one that helped you work through some personal demons in writing it, perhaps over some of your own past mistakes, reminding you what you’ve learned from them? Was it therapeutic to write it? How so?
Absolutely this song is about past mistakes… but, more importantly, it’s about acknowledging and learning from them so they aren’t bound to be repeated. Writing is always therapeutic for me, no matter the content, but “Passenger,” in particular, was therapeutic more in the way of admitting faults and moving forward in a better way.
This song has such a great vibe to it and it sounds like it was fun to record in the studio. Did the finished song come out like you imagined it would, or is it totally different? How so? What was the recording session like for this song?
Thank you. And yes, it was such a blast to record. For this song, one of my favorite Minneapolis studio session drummers, Alexander Young, came in to lay it down. My brother Andre Rodriguez played the piano and organ. Aaron Fabrinni slayed the steel. I played bass and guitars, and it was such a fun track to build from the foundation up. Each instrument added filled up a sonic space that was feeling empty, and by the time it felt like there were no empty spots left to fill, the song was done and sounding far bigger and cooler than I had imagined it would be.
You are a great lyricist. What’s your favorite lyric line in the song? Why is it your favorite?
“There’s an angel on my shoulder and he’s far too drunk to steer. Tossed the keys o’er to the devil and that’s how we wound up here.” That’s the opening like, and I thought it a strong enough line to also make it the closing line, bookending the song. The whole story basically can be told with just those words alone.
What do you hope listeners take away from having heard this song? What do you hope its message is?
I hope they can relate, to some degree, in knowing that we all make mistakes, so they are not alone. But I also hope they think it’s a toe-tapper, and a fun one for singing along or dancing in the living room.
Photo credit: Jake Dixon
