A fun stab at yacht rock, Bryan Estepa’s new single is self-aware but not self-conscious, melancholy but not mopey. It’s also got a hook-laden Style Council vibe that’s impossible not to groove to.
Bryan Estepa always delivers. His songs are unflaggingly buoyant, which is no small feat because the tapestry that informs all of it – you can somehow just tell – is cut from the cloth of melancholy. Still, amazingly, and always: a spring in his step.
In other words, when you spin Bryan’s tunes, you’re not being tricked into a mope fest. You’re given a chance to reframe life’s many larcenies. This quality is most apparent in his all-killer, no-filler EP ‘Back to the Middle.’
Which is funny because it’s the record, as Estepa reflects after the fact, “where I felt like I gave so much […] [that] the well kind of went dry after that.” And as most creative dead-end stories go, the slump is usually followed by a redemptive act.
Estepa picked up the guitar, and despite being practically attached to the instrument for decades – as tool, weapon, and crutch – braved the thought of relearning it anew. “I’d normally be a little worried [about the dry spell], but I threw myself into learning a [ton] of new concepts on guitar and got obsessed over [it] like I did in my teens,” he shares.
Interestingly, when songwriting takes the backseat to instrumentation – and, similarly, when songs are treated like fun things to knock back, rather than grim puzzles to solve – the results can be reinvigorating. And this, hands down, is the case in Bryan’s new single “Is Anybody There?”
Intended as a fun stab at yacht rock (Steely Dan, Doobie Brothers, Hall & Oates, Paul Young, Christopher Cross), the fresh Estepa track – a collaboration with Alex Ertler (drums, bass, keys, guitar) and featuring the saccharine pipes of Melita – is self-aware but not self-conscious. It’s fun, it’s vibrant, it’s hook-laden in a good way.
“It’s the kind of soulful AM-radio pop that I love so much. Still do,” the singer-songwriter shares. And as always in his M.O., it’s sad stuff in its core, but without the deep-seated wallowing and insufferable sense of self-flagellation.
The singing is plaintive, the guitar playing sticky as glue (that solo!), the dynamics sublime. It’s heartening to hear a Bryan Estepa tune that’s firmly outside his usual coloring lines, but still very much familiar: melodic, hopeful, and riddled with joy.
“Picture perfect scenes. / The ride of your life. / It’s dark enough to make believe there’s a tunnel in the light. / Some might say just leave it alone. / It will take some time to find your way back home.”
Listen to “Is There Anybody There?” today.