![]() ![]() What’s the story of you moving to Philly and starting to put music out? She got me into things like that, just by being like, hey, this is where this comes from. She was like, oh, here’s this Offspring CD, but also here’s this Black Flag CD or whatever. My aunt was a punk in the ’80s, and she actually got me into all the classic kinda stuff. What kind of music were you into back then? I think that was in middle school, like maybe 12, 13. He got me that and this VHS tape that taught you a couple chords, and he was like, “Well, if you can do it on this I guess you can do it.” And I kinda just started from there. But I was like, “I want a guitar, I want a guitar,” and it was always no until my dad got me the worst acoustic guitar you could ever imagine. My mom wanted me to take piano lessons at this church we went to, and I wasn’t really into it as a kid, which I regret, ’cause now I wish I was good at piano. MENDEZ: I had to fight a lot to get a guitar. How did you start playing your own music? And I just grabbed it out of his hand and smacked him in the nose with the spine of it. And one day there was this Scholastic book fair in one of the classrooms, and I wanted this book, and this kid took it, and he was gloating about it. And he had this group of friends, and they would all go along with it. MENDEZ: There was one kid who would bully me every day, like beat me up, call me names. Almost got expelled from elementary school. I think I found it hard to connect with people. ![]() I think the first CD that I really got into was my dad’s Queen Greatest Hits CD, and something about the chord changes and the harmonies and the melodies I just really liked. I grew up in suburbs for the most part, so it was definitely culturally a desert. MENDEZ: Yeah, I liked anything that I heard on rock or country radio. I mean, I guess that’s also the reason I wanted to make it, was because I wanted to do that for myself and maybe other people hopefully.ĭo you remember any of the first songs or bands that you heard when you were a little kid? Like, songs felt like little worlds that I could go live in for a couple minutes, if I didn’t like the big world. It really made me feel less alone in a way that nothing else did. GREG MENDEZ: I guess just nothing else made me feel like that. How did you first get into music when you were a kid? It’s often darkly funny, too: “You got the radio playing and all I can think is to change it to some shit I hate / It’s better than something that you like,” Mendez sings on “Best Behavior.”īelow, read an interview with Mendez about his history in music and his writing process. It’s about seeing a dark side of yourself or of somebody that you love. A lot of it, too, is about complex and painful love, whether platonic or romantic. Mendez got clean from drugs in 2015, and many of the songs are either taken from the years before that (closing track “Hoping You’re Doing Okay” shows up on a demos collection from 2009) or looking back on them. The song centers on a simple but lovely repeating melody in which Mendez off-handedly recounts a time he got arrested a crack den, ending up as a truthful and poignant encapsulation of the frustrations and comforts of addiction: “Earlier that day we were both clean/ But then somebody said/ Come back to me, because it’s easy/ Come back to me, I’ll make you happy.”Īddiction rears its head in most of these songs. You can imagine just such a scenario playing out with lead single “Maria,” a moment of random and unrepeatable genius. The album was recorded while Mendez was on workers’ comp after getting a concussion during a construction job, so some of these songs, he reckons, almost literally fell out of his head. Mendez’s unrefined, plaintive voice, his piercing melodies, and his conversational but haunting lyrics all mark him out as one of the best songwriters to come out of a city teeming with great songwriters. His fourth album, a self-titled release out this week, is a quiet masterpiece. That was Phone Records, which was followed by ¯ \_(ツ)_/ ¯ in 2017 and Cherry Hell in 2020. He’s been a fixture of the Philly DIY scene since 2006, when he landed in the city from the New Jersey suburbs, though he didn’t put out a full-length until 2016. Greg Mendez has been around for a while, but you might not have noticed.
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