When we set up a time to talk, Daniel Rodriguez still had an intimate dinner show scheduled for Dec. 5 at Boulder Theater.
That’s of course been postponed (to late April), but Rodriguez still has plenty to chat about, like his debut solo album’s surprise inclusion in the first round of Grammy considerations.
“Somebody who is a voting member [of the Recording Academy] told me that they saw [the album] on the ballot for Best Americana Record,” Rodriguez says. “And if people aren’t aware of you, you kind of get lost in the shuffle. So I just tried to make as many people aware of the fact that I was on there as possible. I haven’t heard anything since… So fingers are crossed, but no expectations.”
Words to live by, in this year more than ever. (Spoiler alert: Rodriguez didn’t make the cut when the Grammy noms were announced on Nov. 24.)
Pandemic aside, Rodriguez has been through some stuff in the past two years. In 2018, his longtime, hard-touring band, Elephant Revival — the impetus for his move to Colorado — went on an indefinite hiatus, and a 14-year romantic relationship came to a close.
He wrote his way through the pain, and the resulting album, Sojourn of a Burning Sun, is an aching embrace of the lessons only true heartbreak can teach.
“Separated from the swelling sea / Came rolling in a single wave,” he sings in the title track. “In the warmth of a mother’s womb / In the web of what’s to come / Soon the days when the flowers bloom / The sojourn of a burning sun.”
Sure enough, the journey of the sun has brought Rodriguez to a new place today: free from the diplomatic confines of working in a band, he’s making music his way; he’s found love again, and he’s on the hunt for a new house in Boulder.
But the stripped down emotion of the album has always been multi-faceted for Rodriguez.
“The album, at least the emotional content of the record, has evolved with how I’ve evolved throughout time,” he says. “I think I wrote the songs with an open perspective. I didn’t write them specifically for heartbreak — even though it’s totally a heartbreak album — but I weaved within it kind of a future self that was looking at myself at that moment and kind of being like, ‘Hey, this is going to be alright; some limbs have to snap in order for new limbs to grow.’ It has ascending qualities to it so that when do I sing the songs now, it still feels good.”
Nowhere is this ascending quality more evident than the closing track, “The Unknown,” a song so vulnerable, Rodriguez says it almost didn’t make the cut:
The storm is over / The chaos took me down / To a place where no one really knows anymore / And I’m getting older / But I’m a new man again / Gone down in a ball of flames / I’m shattered but I’m getting up again / But time is on my side / I bought a ticket now I’m on a ride / I just have to see what’s on the other side / And our love might not be anymore / But now there’s an open door / For whatever that needs to come and go / And love is all we are / That’ll never change / But who we choose to love that remains
Firmly on the other side, Rodriguez is clearly enjoying the ride. He has a whole album’s worth of new material ready for recording, and he’s producing a hip-hop record with a friend on the East Coast.
“We’re going by 21st Ancient,” he says. “If Leonard Cohen, Jim Morrison and the Wu-Tang Clan had a baby, that’s what it sounds like.”
