ELIOT EIDELMAN
“All I need is a cabin in the woods with a piano,” has been Eliot Eidelman’s refrain since experiencing a creative outburst at an artist residency in the Mojave that spawned the material for his first solo album back in 2014. Nearly a decade and seven releases later, his dream for Thoreauvian artistic solitude came true when he settled into a tiny house trailer in a remote canyon outside of Ojai, California, with just enough room to fit a Baldwin upright. Silhouette is the first album since the radical lifestyle shift toward complete devotion to his art. “I stopped going out, drinking and smoking, and just got into a flow where I’m always creating and honing my sound.”
In the fall of 2023 Eliot reconvened with longtime collaborator Evan Backer of Wand for a series of recording sessions that yielded dozens of tracks covering Eliot’s time as a live-in graveyard shift manager of a rock’n’roll hotel in Atlanta, his years as a musical tour guide of historic New Orleans, and his current chapter as a hermitic canyon creature. Silhouette is the first collection from these sessions to see the light of day, featuring a distinctive classic Americana palette soaked in Tyler Nuffer’s pedal steel and a playful, rebellious attitude that has long been a trademark of Eliot’s lyrical style, now more refreshing than ever.
Eliot has been a songwriter from the womb. He was humming tunes before he could utter a word. The earliest originals that are still in his repertoire date back to age seven, when he first picked up a guitar. By 13 he was Dylan-obsessed, leading a band of fellow middle schoolers and cutting his first recordings. A jolting early adolescent cross-country move from the San Francisco Bay Area to Atlanta thrust him into a blossoming freak folk scene and regular rock gigs on the bar circuit while still in high school. He made a brief foray into the Athens scene before heading back west to enroll at CalArts and study music with Wadada Leo Smith.
While at CalArts, Eliot fronted the experimental rock ensemble Realization Orchestra with distinguished jazz players and future members of Ty Segall Band and Wand. Realization Orchestra toured widely playing DIY shows on the West Coast and cut two EP-length song-suites before dissolving as members graduated from CalArts and went their separate ways. Eliot played guitar in the Sacramento-based instrumental avant-prog outfit Gentleman Surfer for a couple tours of the Western US before tiring of the noisy experimental rock scene and returning to his roots as a lyrical acoustic songwriter.
Out of college, Eliot was largely unemployed, broke and on the move between tours, recording projects, artist residencies and housesitting gigs throughout North America and Europe for several years. He was a founding member of the Splendor All Around songwriting collective in Berkeley that toured the West Coast in a blue school bus, doubling as a venue for intimate acoustic shows. He lived and played with veteran songwriter Victoria Williams in Joshua Tree and through her befriended Mark Olsen of the Jayhawks and Mike Watt of the Minutemen. He developed a reputation on the road as a prolific and versatile songwriter with a commanding live presence.
At age 26, burnt out from years of transience, living out of a van and sleeping on couches, he sought refuge in Atlanta’s equivalent to the Chelsea Hotel as a musicians’ haven, the Highland Inn. He was assigned a post as an overnight manager and moved into the room that Cole and Zumi of Black Lips had just vacated, where he resided for the next two years. There he recorded and produced two albums on a handheld digi 4-track recorder, often while also manning the front desk of the hotel and the errant shenanigans that entailed in the late-night hours.
An opportunity to produce a third album in this “Handheld Recordings” series as an artist-in-residence at an arts and ecology co-op in Washington state was Eliot’s calling card to move out of the hotel and head back West. A period of heavy touring followed that concluded with Eliot moving into a shotgun in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. For the next three years he led musical walking tours of the French Quarter and Tremé neighborhoods and went underground with his songwriting during the pandemic.
A chance encounter at a Mardi Gras parade led to Eliot uprooting once again, this time to Ojai, California. Eliot now works as a private music and songwriting teacher in Ojai and spends his free time adding to and refining his catalog of hundreds of original songs. He continues to collaborate with multi-instrumentalist and engineer Evan Backer, who he’s been producing recordings with for 15 years under the moniker, “Evan and Eliot on Earth Productions.”
Says Eliot of his current process, “I often wake up in the morning with a tune in my head, a lingering remnant from the dream state. I climb down from the loft and try to draw it out with words on the piano or guitar into a working song as swiftly as possible. I don’t question where my musical and lyrical ideas come from. If I wonder what other people are going to make of them, it totally shuts me down creatively. I’m willing and eager to explore the dark places, to discover unseemly characters and take big risks. I feel it’s my duty as an artist to channel the unconscious unfiltered, without the heavy burden of societal opinions and expectations weighing down on me. The notion that song lyrics should make the singer-speaker always appear “likable” to the audience seems extremely limiting to me. If we demanded our characters always be likable across other forms of writing, the state of narrative art would be in a very boring place. I’m committed to keeping things interesting by exploring all aspects of the human condition in song.”