During the summer of 2024 Eliot found himself reeling from a recent breakup with a love who, out of the blue, admitted she didn’t care much for his music. Blindsided by this revelation, his response was that he didn’t think their relationship would work if she didn’t appreciate his creative output. With that, she suddenly and unexpectedly broke off all contact with him. He was left isolated and in shock, grieving the loss of his romantic partner and best friend.

A prolonged period of depression ensued in which Eliot sought solace in his songwriting, motivated by pain and humiliation to advance his craft. Out of this difficult yet creatively fruitful period, more than a few songs reflecting on the breakup and his ensuing state of mind emerged, some of which were selected to make up his latest album in the pits. The album, Eliot’s eleventh, was recorded at the end of ‘24 in Los Angeles with long-time collaborator Evan Backer (Wand) and Neil Wogensen (Valley Queen) co-producing.

The final installment of his “Jesus Year” trilogy, Eliot Eidelman’s latest album Dangerous veers again stylistically from the cosmic Americana of Silhouette and the psychedelic folk of Mrs. Paddiwinkle’s Treats, now finding him mischievously tinkering in the territory of blues and glam rock. Thematically steeped in malaise, discontent, longing and disillusionment, with occasional glimmers of self-acceptance and freedom, Dangerous is Eliot’s rawest collection to date, yet it never dispenses of the knowing wink made apparent in the album’s cheeky title and artwork.

Recorded in a basement in Tujunga and a tiny house in Los Padres with longtime collaborator Evan Backer (Wand, Cory Hanson), Dangerous ties together the scraps that didn’t fit neatly on the first two albums of the trilogy, yet oddly may be the most cohesive collection of the three. A simmering ride with moments of levity and self-caricature embedded in the drama, Dangerous dares to trace a fine line between the painfully cathartic and the playfully absurd.

Eliot Eidelman is a wild-spirited and prolific singer/songwriter who is releasing a fantastic new album on SADFAM Records. Mrs. Paddiwinkle’s Treats, is a collection of contemporary lullabies, nursery rhymes, torch songs, mantras and classical art song.

The album features intimate live performances of Eliot accompanying himself on guitar and piano at home in his tiny cabin located in a remote canyon outside of Ojai, CA, backed by colorful arrangements concocted with co-producing collaborator Evan Backer (Wand, Cory Hanson, Itasca). Ranging from solo musings to synthesized symphonic sweeps, Mrs. Paddiwinkle’s Treats catalogs some of Eliot’s recent explorations outside the territory of rock and Americana and deep into acoustic psychedelia, with echos further back to early jazz, traditional folk, and classical traditions.

From Rufus:

“Eliot is a long-time friend whose music I have been inspired by for the past 15 years. His influences come from all corners of time and space (everything from Beethoven’s late string quartets to Moroccan music field recordings). His unbound musical interests manifest wonderfully in his idiosyncratic, outsider music. This album brings me into a fantastical world. A world that connects past to future. It gets me to consider small things, as well as big, emancipatory ways of being. That’s the kind of music I want to listen to.”

From Eliot:

“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, I just get them down. When I revisit these semi-conscious creations later, it’s sometimes hard for me to believe that I was the one who wrote them… It’s as if they came from somewhere else entirely. It’s kind of eery and magical and I like it.”

“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.