Andrés Miguel Cervantes brings back his Western Noir desert soundscapes with the release of his second full length album, Songs for the Seance, released on independent label Speakeasy Studios SF. Born and raised in San Diego, while calling the SF Bay area home, Cervantes' music is influenced by songwriters Leonard Cohen, Townes Van Zandt, Fred Neil, and singers Vicente “Chente” Fernandez, George Jones and Merle Haggard. Cervantes' lyrics and songcraft are distinctly his own, with beautiful haunting images of landscapes both internal and external delivered with his virtuosic folk guitar finger picking style that is as if Bert Jansch met Mississippi John Hurt on the crossroads of a dark desert road.
Songs For The Seance is a meditation on the collection of memories that live inside us all, experienced, dreamed, or inherited from our ancestors. It touches on themes of identity, the need for belonging, loss, isolation, and hope. Songs that soar through haunting noir soundscapes, about communicating with our ghosts, facing what haunts us, and knowing that “there’s some winning in staying alive.”
Songs For The Seance is a moving and expansive follow up to Cervantes’ debut and internationally acclaimed album The Crossing. Cervantes returns to the studio with producer Alicia Vanden Heuvel to record, once again, to Otari ½” 8 track, an analog process, with the contributions of live bandmates Jacob Aranda (pedal steel, violin), Jessie Leigh Smith (harmonica), Raphi Gottesman (drums), Alicia Vanden Heuvel (bass,vocals, percussion), Hall McCann (lead guitar, vocals), Graham Norwood (guitar), Conor Riley (piano) and Noelle Fiore (vocals).
Songs For The Seance was born from Cervantes’ meditative process of songwriting, crafted while living and traveling throughout the southwest, in the Mojave and Sonora deserts along the coast to where the Pacific ocean touches the bays of San Diego and San Francisco.
Cervantes’ songwriting on Songs For The Seance explores themes of the soul, the love we feel, the dark and the light, of feeling haunted, unsettled, and yet seeking hope. A reflection on collective and ancestral memory, inherited and lived experience, in our families, with our loved ones.
