Greg Mendez’s room without a view

The record was a turning point for Mendez, who, up to that point, had been quietly writing and recording music between Philadelphia and New York for fifteen years. With the critical acclaim of Greg Mendez, he’d finally broken through, moving from the inconspicuousness of the DIY underground to a label home with Dead Oceans, and a new phase in his life in which he could pursue music full-time. 

“I’m able to not really work another job now, which is cool,” Mendez says with an easygoing cadence when I ask him how things have changed over the last couple of years. He tells me that he’s been occupied with touring, but he doesn’t seem to mind too much. “That just became my life more than anything, playing shows and driving.” 

Mendez speaks with incredible modesty, but you’d be hard-pressed to believe that his slow-burn success wasn’t earned. Even though he released two albums and an EP before Greg Mendez, his self-titled work painted a compelling self-portrait through meandering recollections of love, addiction, and critical self-examination matched by minimal instrumentation. 

Mendez’s arrangements are woven carefully, bearing the fragility of elaborate silk webs. Heavy anecdotes are framed by reticent acoustic melodies, creating a softer landing for stories of crack dens and pleas for reconciliation on “Maria”, or coming to terms with mistreatment on “Clearer Picture (Of You)”. But there are moments in which Mendez chronicles true emotional ruination, admitting “I won’t love again after you” on “Sweetie”, and “You never felt so scared to be alone ’til now” on “Shark’s Mouth”, that feel like a hard fall into sunken pavement, forcing the listener to contend with the humanity of an artist picking himself – and his world – apart. 

However, Mendez is mindful of not getting stuck in a web of his own design, as evidenced by his fourth album and Dead Oceans debut, Beauty Land. The record is described as having parts that mimic a lucid dream, in which “dented characters carve their way through a world that’s cartoonish and warped.”

As a result, Mendez is no longer being observed through quick overviews of his afflictions, but his experiences are refracted and uncommitted to a particular timeline. “The lyrics feel more abstract to me than the self-titled, and they feel more like they span time,” he explains. “I feel like the self-titled was abstract in terms of the songs feeling like snapshots of a few moments in my life, or a very specific thing. With these songs, the perspective feels a bit different. It’s like a movie.”

“I feel like the voice in Beauty Land is more childish than Greg Mendez for some reason,” he adds. “Not childish in a bad way, but more so dealing with that kind of experience sometimes. With the self-titled album, when I was making it, it felt more like I was looking back on things. I feel like on this one, it felt less like that, and the voice is more present.”

Although the songs pick up on the themes that formed his self-titled album, Mendez is mindful to emphasise that he wasn’t just trying to create “the self-titled but better.” Beauty Land holds up independently as its own underdog story, with the songs being “self-effacing without self-pity.” and Mendez recognises the merit in this. “I don’t know how other people are going to react to it, and it would be a lie if I said I didn’t consider it, but I tried to do things as if I weren’t. It feels like a different thing to me, so I guess that’s good enough.”

“Good enough”, however, is understated. When I first come face-to-face with Mendez at the beginning of our conversation, I’m caught off guard, admittedly misty-eyed after revisiting Beauty Land before we meet. Sandwiched somewhere between the closing glimmer of “No Evil” and “Interlude in D Minor”, I’m prompted to understand, oh, these songs are different. I find humour in the idea of being exposed at the other side of Mendez’s vulnerability.

But later, he’d reveal that being unexplainably moved by the tracks was a “pretty cool” response, relative to his hope that listeners can find Beauty Land relatable, and feel something – anything – from it. “I hope it’s not boredom or anger at it, but I guess that’s better than nothing, too,” he smiles. 

But boredom doesn’t seem like anything that Mendez has to worry about with Beauty Land. The album doesn’t solely rely on subtle guitar motifs to have a heart. Rather, the songs came together using a more organic, exploratory process, in which Mendez began to try out whatever instruments were within reach – a byproduct of having more time to focus on the songwriting process, which was primarily led by intuition. 

“I didn’t go to music school or any shit like that,” he tells me. “I don’t know how to read music or write music, and I’m really just following my ear. I don’t even know if I’m a natural at it, but it just gets a little bit less difficult with each song. The instruments that I had lying around and were sparking my interest at the moment were more percussion and more weird keyboards. Less electric guitar and less drum kit. This was just the tonal world that the album is sitting in, so I leaned into that stuff.”

This unlocked new avenues of expression for Mendez, who was articulating himself through new textures and reference points. He found himself singing into an old sampler keyboard, explaining simply, “it just made me feel a strong way, so I used it a lot.” With greater confidence in his ability to construct arrangements, he allowed himself to lean into his longtime influences, the Beatles and the Elephant 6 Collective. “With this one, I went more in that direction than I have in the past,” he tells me. “Maybe it’s just because I felt able to.” 

Mendez’s growing sense of self-belief comes through with immediacy on Beauty Land, namely with lead single and album opener, “I Wanna Feel Pretty”. As the first introduction to Beauty Land, it calls upon a familiar sonic palette for Mendez as he counts himself into a somberly strummed acoustic melody. 

The opening lines of “I wanna feel pretty and lay in bed / When nobody’s with me / I don’t have a spine it goes straight to my head / I’ll sink if I want / Or I’ll swim till I’m dead” quickly excavate Mendez’s anguished space. Taking it a step further, he trudges through the verses against a plodding key progression that offers a cracked semblance of hope as he grapples with relapse, amounting to a strained, almost deceptive conclusion of “I couldn’t believe it, I felt so free.”

The track is stark, confronting, and dynamic. And it only took twenty minutes to come together. “I was just sitting on the bed, and I played those chords in that rhythm,” he recalls. “That sparked something. It really just rolled out of the bed, kind of stream-of-consciousness style.” 

But while the bones were all there, Mendez admits that the execution of “I Wanna Feel Pretty” was actually more laborious than it comes across. “The arrangement just really pissed me off,” he reveals. “It took so long to get it there. And I felt really bad about it for a while, but it is what it is.” 

This appears to be a side effect of experimentation, as the album opener wasn’t the only song that Mendez struggled to lay out a vision for. “With the instrumentation, on some of them I just kept throwing things at the wall,” he explains. “But it kept failing and really pissing me off.” This was further exacerbated by the pressure of figuring out the best way to order the tracks. “I laboured over that a lot too,” he admits. “I don’t think it really says anything linear, but the arc of how the album is presented was really important to me.” 

But thankfully, Mendez could find some solace in his own containment. No track on Beauty Land exceeds three minutes, and that’s just because he’s comfortable admitting when he’s said everything that needs to be said. The songs don’t need to drawl out to be affecting. “Sometimes I just feel like I run out of ideas,” he says candidly. “I like when songs do what they need to do, and don’t do more. There are some of them where I thought, let’s bring back a chorus or a verse, but it always felt so off. I think that there is this weird pressure that people put on themselves for a song to be three and a half minutes or whatever, but who fucking cares? It should end when it ends, whenever I stop thinking of stuff, or whenever it feels right.”

With that, each song on Beauty Land is set in its purpose. Among the singles, the childish voice that Mendez alludes to is at its strongest on “Gentle Love”, as he bids for parental connection against a contrarily upbeat instrumental. On “Frog”, he only repeats the line “Please forgive me for my faults” over stretched key tones, while “No Evil” pulls a blindfold over a space of loneliness and rumination that he inhabits, wondering, “Maybe you’ll give me more / Till I’m dancing and I’m crying / Until I can’t see no evil,” as he throws himself into its urgent build-up. 

These are the workings of a singer-songwriter who has scraped his reflections and observations down to their most exposed points. Mendez recorded Beauty Land in relative isolation at his Philadelphia home studio, a small space with no natural light that allowed him to piece together stories from a place of full immersion. 

The self-sufficiency of Mendez’s process is largely born out of necessity. He’s honest about his struggle to relinquish control, describing himself as someone who “doesn't know what he wants, but knows exactly what he wants.”

“I’ve always just done stuff on my own for the most part, because I’m super particular,” he explains. “I know there are people who can do it better, but I would probably just make them tear their hair out trying to get an album to the place that I want it. And I can just tear my own hair out doing it.” 

Mendez recognises the value of collaboration, but ultimately, his self-awareness is stronger. ”I’m just too much of a fucking – I don't know,” he trails off, “I'm so controlling about it, for better, for worse.”

What this does mean is that Mendez can feel his way through the songs at his own pace. “I was feeling pretty intense about it once it was mastered and everything,” Mendez says, when I ask him whether he saw a shift in his perspective on Beauty Land after finishing the album. “Even though I was a psycho about mastering – and I didn’t do it – but I was going back and forth on different versions. At that point, I thought it was the worst thing I’ve ever heard in my life. It was like nails on a chalkboard, and I never wanted to hear it again or release it. But after I approved it and exited the stage of making it, I felt much better about it.”

And for his own peace of mind, it’s imperative that Mendez washes his hands of an album after seeing it to completion. “Every decision that I’m making, I come to it as if it’s going to make or break it,” he admits. “I think it’s good in a way, but also horrible for my mental health.” 

With Beauty Land in particular, Mendez began to recognise the adverse impact of being so deeply entrenched in his process and remaining preoccupied by those decisions. “I need to figure out a work-life balance,” he asserts. “I really fell apart in my life while making Beauty Land, because it was consuming me. People were not very happy with me, and were just concerned. My ability to take care of myself as a person and all of my relationships suffered. I was doing things that were really bad for me. I was drinking again, I had to relearn that I was an addict, and I got pretty bad with that. I just learned that I need to have balance.”

With the album finished, Mendez is in a space where he can recalibrate. From what he describes, creating art comes with a great cost. But he also appears assured in what he needs to do to create a healthy distance between himself and the sense of imbalance that he faced while making Beauty Land. In a practical, environmental sense, his first order of business is to change up the scenery. 

“This studio has been in the second bedroom of our apartment, and I’m moving it out to a different space,” he explains. “It feels like this room is that record. On the self-titled, we lived in a different apartment. I’ve never done two records in the same room. And we’re not moving right now, but I feel like this has to move.” 

As Mendez acknowledges that his work ultimately has a life of its own, it’s clear that, in some ways, leaving it behind is how he can begin to carve out a path for what’s next. Beauty Land is darker than its predecessor, he tells me. It deals heavily with death, not because it’s what Mendez wanted to talk about, but because it’s what came through. Guided by the spur of the moment, he’s not entirely certain of what’s on the horizon. For now, the album that he spent a year and a half on is done, and now all that’s left is for people to find their own sense of connection with it.

“Maybe I’ll retire,” Mendez jokes. “I don’t have enough money to retire, but I always just feel like I never want to do it again after I finish any big work.” 

If we’re lucky, Beauty Land won’t be the last of Greg Mendez. And beyond his humility, which could even veer into self-deprecation, he arrives at a conclusion about the album that feels like a new door swung wide open. “I think it’s the best,” he says, almost coyly. “I think it’s my favourite thing that I’ve done.”