Ethan Daniel Davidson’s second record of 2025 deepens the allegorical and reflective songcraft that he established on Cordelia earlier this year. Lear is a rich, legs-stretched companion to its counterpart where Davidson draws from his life’s experiences like water from a freshly tapped well. Lear’s eight songs possess a distinct ache akin to Neil Young’s On the Beach. Every lyric, a new road to be explored, and Davidson, the perfect guide to the journey.
Davidson’s fourteenth studio album emerged from the same sessions that birthed Cordelia, in similar fashion to alt-country legends Lambchop’s 2004 sister albums Aw C’mon and You C’Mon. He’s accompanied by the same crackerjack team: producers David Katznelson and Luther Dickinson, bassist and Emmylou Harris collaborator Byron House, drummer Marco Giovino (Robert Plant, John Cale), and pedal steel legend Rayfield “Ray Ray” Holloman. At first blush, these tunes might appear more deceptively upbeat than the ruminations on Cordelia, but fear not—Davidson is still mining the dark corners of his own psyche to great aplomb.
“It’s me trying to figure out what's happening inside of myself,” he explains, while reflecting on the lyrical headspace he inhabits throughout Lear. “I'm a positive person, but this is a part of my own psychological healing process, which we should all engage in. We're all wounded people, in some kind of way—and I've figured out how to confront that through music and storytelling.” Sometimes, that means confronting his own catalog, as “Count the Knives” revisits the original’s easy-shaking arrangement as captured on 2015’s Drawnigh and reshapes the tune into a lovingly languid, slow-burning soul tune. “It's cool to rediscover my own music in this manner—it’s like I'm covering myself. The approach to the music is completely different, so I’m discovering new things in the song itself.”
There’s a thematic thread that unites Shakespeare’s Cordelia and Lear in which Davidson has consistently found parallels to his own life. “King Lear had a real resonance with me,” he explains. “I always identified with Cordelia, because she wasn't after her father for money or anything like that—she just loved him. My adopted father was very successful, and he had sycophants who tried to drag my reputation through the mud, to try and drive a wedge in between us. Whether or not he ultimately bought into that, it's hard to say—but the situation definitely made me feel more like Cordelia.”
The allusion takes on an especially self-reflective tone on the gently stormy “Bad Company Brought Me Here.” Davidson opines lyrically, “Middle-aged men are vampires/ And old men become King Lear.” He elaborates, “I've known middle-aged men who’d hang around with and date younger people—trying to feed off of the youth, like vampires. I saw King Lear in Stratford a couple years ago, and in the program there was a quote that said, ‘All old men become King Lear.’ I thought, ‘Oh gosh, that's pretty grim. Elderly men, when faced with our own mortality—do we go to a place where we need to have sycophants around us?’”
The gorgeous swell of “How Can One Keep Warm” features guitar contributions from Alvin Youngblood Hart, while “Not Breaking Hearts” a lead performance from Duane Betts, the son of late and legendary Allman Brothers six-stringer Dickie Betts: “Duane came in and played shortly after his father passed away,” Davidson explains. “It was such an honor to have him play on this song.”
Lyrically, the lush and echoing opener “Stop Breaking Down” nods to two country classics—Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” and Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”—that emphasize Davidson’s gaze towards the past as he moves forward. “My songs have become more autobiographical,” he reflects. “I’m recounting my own experiences with heartbreak and being on the road. When I was younger, I was hitchhiking around—throwing everything I had off the back of a train and trying to escape whatever life I had as a younger person. I had some bad experiences in some different towns, and my heart has been broken in a thousand different ways. I don't even see through the same eyes anymore.”
Davidson describes the shuffling glow of “Not Breaking Hearts,” “My attempt at writing a classic ‘60s country song. The songs have gotten long on these last few albums, and I want people to know that I can also write a song that runs for only two and a half minutes,” he chuckles. Meanwhile, the serpentine “Waiting For Me” was inspired by a particular creative process undertaken on Cordelia, as well as a chance to truly unleash Holloman’s singular powers: “On the last record, the guys said, ‘Write a song real quick,” which resulted in “Leaving Soon”,” Davidson recalls. “This time, they challenged me to write a classic soul song that transitioned into a sacred steel number with a praise break, so I wrote this song. It gave Ray-Ray and the band a real opportunity to stretch themselves out. I never thought I'd have musicians like that playing with me.”
“The World We Wanted” is a wry and skewering piece inspired by the ever-looming existential threat of climate change and political sorting. It’s imbued with the worldly perspective that Davidson—a newly ordained rabbi, having completed his ordination shortly after putting the final touches on Lear—has long brought to his work as a thinker and storyteller. “When I look at the world and think about how we’d like to change things about it, we lack the political will to actually do anything about it,” he reflects. “As a global society, we just don’t have it. The way our information universe exists now, the world has somehow flattened out for all of us. We paint nuanced issues with broad brushes, but I want to tell people that the world isn’t really that way.”
Across Lear, his messages ring loud and clear, marking yet another high point in a steadily expanding catalogue.
