Brad Mehldau – Ride Into The Sun

Description

Release Date 29th August 2025

Nonesuch Records
releases pianist and composer
Brad Mehldau’s
Ride into the Sun, a songbook record of music by the late singer, songwriter, and guitarist
Elliott musicians include singer/guitarist
Daniel Rossen (Grizzly Bear); singer/mandolinist
Chris Thile (Punch Brothers, Nickel Creek); bassists
Felix Moseholm (Brad Mehldau Trio, Samara Joy) and
John Davis (who also engineered and mixed the album); drummer
Matt Chamberlain (Fiona Apple, Tori Amos, Randy Newman); and a chamber orchestra led by
Dan Coleman, who also conducted on Mehldau’s 2010 album Highway Rider.

Ride into the Sun’s 10 Elliott Smith songs are complemented by four Mehldau compositions that he says are “inspired by, and reflect, Smith’s oeuvre.”Also included are interpretations of
Big Star’s ‘Thirteen’, which Smith also covered, and ‘Sunday’ by Nick Drake, who Mehldau says, “I look at in some ways as sort of Smith’s visionary godfather.”

Recalling how he first got to know Smith and his music, which has been a regular part of his repertoire for years, Mehldau said that after years living in New York, he moved to Los Angeles “and there was this wonderful scene of singer-songwriters that was congregating at a club called included Elliott but it also included artists like Rufus Wainwright, Fiona then other musicians who had been around for a while would come down every Friday night to sit in on a gig that was led by Jon Brion.I played behind Elliott on his own tunes with felt to me like a kind of renaissance in songwriting that flourished for a number of years.”

“Elliott Smith masterfully rendered the dark/light admix not in the least through his distinct harmony,” Mehldau continues.“Specifically, he had a way of combining major and minor modes that was all his hear that on the unique, captivating chord progression that he introduced on ‘Tomorrow Tomorrow’ for just a moment before the last verse of the song.I use it, extending it for my piano solo kind of minor-major gambit has a long pedigree, and my own associations as a listener include the music of Schubert and Brahms, among others.

“One of Brahms’ biographers described the feeling of one of his pieces as ‘smiling through tears’, and it would be a goodfor the opening tune of Elliott’s on this set, ‘Better Be Quiet Now.’Here is a break-up song as tender as it is rueful; the protagonist is smiling sadly as he says goodbye.”

“‘Ride into the sun’ is a beautiful point in the lyric of one of the songs that we play, ‘Colorbars’,” Mehldau says.“Elliott Smith says in the original song, ‘Everyone wants me to ride into the sun’.When I listen to music, I have a feeling that I can be in communion with somebody who is no longer in this earthly realm, like he is as far as ‘riding into the sun’, it’s maybe more of a perpetual riding into the sun with him.I don’t know…There’s something mystical there.”