Composer, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and director Ethan Gold has been in the musical game for quite some time now and even survived a freak head injury that left the artist unable to speak. Gold turned lemon into lemonades and discovered a new realm of creativity and musical ideas that might not have blossomed had he not encountered life’s daring obstacles.
Gold brings power pop flourishes of The Posies and Big Star while delivering a singer-songwriter flair that boasts of introspection, wit, melody, and perseverance. There is a strummy commentary mixed with a folk diamond in the rough edge that gives this multi-dimensional creative a fresh voice as we enter a late pandemic staged world.
Gold is rewarding those patiently waiting for his sophomore album with a trilogy of LPs, with the first, Earth City 1: The Longing, coming out on May 14th. Preceding its arrival Gold will be sharing two pairs of singles: “Alexandria & Me”/“In New York” (released on February 25) and “Bright & Lonely City”/“Storm Coming” (April 1). Earth City 2 is slated for a January 2022 release date with Earth City 3 concluding the trilogy during the summer of ’22. The L.A.-based artist/producer/composer also will be putting out singles and videos in between every album’s release.
While the three Earth City albums fit together as a piece, each one has its own thematic concerns. The first album explores “the longing” — our fascination and alienation amidst the connections and disconnections we all experience in the highly complex 21st-century world. It’s fitting that longing is the focus of the trilogy’s opening because longing is, as Gold describes it, “the first step of yearning that drives us inward and forward into the most profound experiences of living. Doubt, searching, and loneliness are motivating principles that bring us towards others, and they bring us towards grace.”
The trilogy’s title, Earth City, reflects a certain civilizational yin-yang existing today, with the world becoming more connected digitally yet people feeling more alienated and disconnected than ever. While these themes of isolation and dissatisfaction among people might seem spurred by the pandemic, Gold had this project in the works long before COVID-19 appeared. Still, he acknowledges that “the same impulse that drove me to construct this trilogy is connected to the same stuff that caused the pandemic: excessive, unconscious interconnectedness, and the hole this creates inside people.”
Glide is proud to premiere the video for “Alexandria & Me” (below) a colorful montage that brings Gold’s heartfelt words to the big and small screen.
“I might have filmed in the very hallways and rooms which inspired this song — the Alexandria Hotel, with an actress who could be Alexandria and could be living or not, in the thrilling night on the town in this megalopolis, or as an gnostic priest told me after I’d written the song, this reincarnation of the ancient city of Alexandria. Where a luxuriant smell of death commingled with the barely-living, and people used to cross from living to dead or dead to living. But my time machines got downsized by a pandemic so I used no crew but my phone, then I told my editor Douglas Emerson to use a maximalist approach, to evoke the overwhelming psychedelic flavor of the stenchy velvet halls of the corroded, colorful, bleak, exhilarating downtown LA before speculators came in with whitewash,” says Gold.
Photo by Shane Lopes
