The real estate in the jukebox is suffering somewhat of a housing crisis. After all, the past is the most comforting place to go in a world where nothing new is ever as cool. Zach Top is imitating it, Colter Wall is reimagining it, Charley Crockett seems plucked straight from it, and there’s a baker’s dozen of these types of guys. These modern troubadours are aspiring mavericks of an era they’re a decade or four removed from. Ironically, they’re growing out of the ground with as much fertility as the puffed-up pop machine on the other side of town, despite an insistence that traditionality is an endangered species. Like most corners of the industry, it’s a crowded street. At its best, it’s imaginative and reinvigorating, keeping the culture alive. At its worst, it feels like a return trip to Disneyland as an adult. You enter the pearly park gates searching for that long-gone, rose-colored innocence in the flashing lights and leave with sweat stuck to your back, realizing how cherry-picked and perspiration-free those bygone memories have become.
The part of Jesse Daniel’s take on the game that’s so invigorating is an acknowledgement that his back is sweaty and his legs are tired. Even if he’s become fully entrenched in the look and the sound over the years, from his plain-faced delivery to his big bushy sideburns, the Johnny Paycheck look-alike contest winner doesn’t seem to take the ride all that seriously. “A child is born, a child grows old, the same old story gets retold,” he proclaims on this LP’s opener, a stark yet bluntly clever reminder of how stale and cyclical these notions of preservation can get. Daniel’s acutely aware of the theatrics, the constant facade that must be hoisted up, and how quickly a mirror-rehearsed persona can crumble under pressure. But he’s just cynical enough to know that the experience is far from singular.
And that’s what makes “Son of the San Lorenzo,” Jesse Daniel’s fifth studio record in seven years, his most endearing project to date. Maybe it’s the nature of the grind setting in, or the dim and dour outlook from his punk band days weaving into the silver linings of traditional country music. He’s not a spokesperson for the new neo-outlaw phenomenon by choice or proximity, as he could have accomplished both easily. There’s no unwinnable game or all-solving hook on his road to glory. No, the marked spot on the map is far more self-centric than that. This record, a clear homecoming, is trying to uncover some of that internal quiet beneath the shoreline of his Bay Area origins. His home has changed, but so has he, and to ignore the latter would be unfair to the former. Daniel’s biggest diversion and enchanting quality might be the ability to interpret your place in the world rather than react to it. It’s a feeling that springs to life on the record’s title track. It’s an earthy, granola approach to cowboy colloquialisms that are a native tongue to the Californian. He feels out of our time but never relies on or gospelizes the cited texts he pulls inspiration from. It makes Daniel feel like a vessel at the mercy of the world rather than a force applying friction to it.
Those fables recited ad nauseum boomerang back to us on “He,” an improper pronoun with specific implications. While the track means something more inked in than a mere template of masculinity to Daniel, it reads as an every-father story. You get the sense Daniel is talking to himself, some former version of his current character, though the lessons learned are broad enough to be universal. It gets easier before it gets harder; the way it was won’t ever revive itself; you’ve heard the story before. It’s a personal narrative told from an impersonal point of view, equal parts granular as it is shaved down to a one-size tale—an impressive feat in penmanship, inviting a rough sketch idea to be colored in freely.
But it isn’t all mulled-over, told a thousand times cliches. The west coast, bare feet in the grass approach seems to be Daniel’s newly discovered mode all over this record, which is dedicated in name and style to his beachfront origins. It’s a softer, breezy diversion from his typical full-tilt saloon ground and pound. There is a slight detour from the honky-tonk scene, partly in his motifs within the writing, but it is immediately noticed in more tranquil moments that fill the gaps. “Jodi” acts as a Willie Nelson slow dance through the creek, filled with harmonica croaks and faint chirps of pedal steel. It’s a testament to the soft and sweet normalcy Daniel can muster up when he has the sole attention of the spotlight. “Time Well Spent,” alongside fellow crunchy crooner Charles Wesley Godwin, aligns their respective chakras thanks to these two reedy baritones delivering a Prine-adjacent narration on every man’s most precious commodity. Illustrating these idealized, pastoral aspirations and concepts of manhood, fleeting youth, and blossoming love, this is where Daniel’s cup now feels at its fullest.
It’s not necessarily that Daniel doesn’t have aspirations of a burgeoning spotlight for his flavor of the dish, with tracks like “Prankster” and “The End” adding in some slight jolts of jam to liven an otherwise placid mood. However, much of his latest project directs its observations and criticisms inward, embellishing a more malleable point of view than most of his peers have the patience for. While most traditionalists fight what the world’s made of them, he seems to be having fun trying to figure it out. Peppered with influence from laissez-faire coastal rock groups and passive voice songwriting gurus, Daniel feels less eager than many of his counterparts to tread old ground both personally and professionally. The result is far more imaginative than it is imitative.
