BY: DIGITAL WAX MEDIA STAFF

 

Minnesota musicians Dan Murphy and Jeff Arundel, known collectively as The Scarlet Goodbye, released their second album on Friday, El Camino Adios, delivering on the promise of fantastic singles such as “Speedway,” “To Feel the Sun,” and “Raylene” released earlier this year.

 

Produced by Arundel, El Camino Adios offers up ten distinct tracks the work alongside one another in the representation of a cohesive whole, but also function singularly as individual reflections of various stylistic and sonic facets of The Scarlet Goodbye.

 

“I think they’re different statements in terms of cohesiveness. With the first record we were kind of developing what we sounded like,” Murphy tells Digital Wax. “On this record we were kind of in the zone. Things were coming together and it was cohesive.”

 

 

 

 

With a firmly established musical identity in place following the release of 2023’s Hope’s Eternal, The Scarlet Goodbye set about constructing their most impressive set of tunes yet for a follow-up. Primarily featuring instrumentation tracked live in the studio, the band took an organic approach to the production and recording of El Camino Adios.

 

Scarlet Goodbye members characterize the new album as more keyboard-driven than its predecessor, noting that the keyboards were generally tracked live along with other instruments rather than tacked on as overdubs later in the process. The keys were also significant in the process in that the music for many of the tunes comprising El Camino Adios was written on piano.

 

Such was the case for the album’s evocative third single “Raylene,” the writing of which Murphy detailed in a recent conversation with Digital Wax.

 

”Specifically on [Raylene,] Jeff wrote a lot of the [chord] changes on guitar. He said ‘why don’t you mess around with this on piano and see what you can come up with?’, he said.

 

“Dan’s got a crafty piano thing,” Arundel chimes in. “I just said, ‘play these changes on and mess around with them,’ and it was the opening D [section].”

 

There’s a sonic warmth that inhabits the album, lending a singer-songwriter feel to what could, in many ways, be categorized as alternative music otherwise. It’s an interesting sort of contrast that one might consider to be indicative of the particular “sound” of The Scarlet Goodbye.

 

This dynamic is readily apparent in tunes like the title track and first proper song on the album, “El Camino Adios,” with is anchored by vocals and acoustic guitar from Arundel. Another great case study in this sort of sonic assessment is “Sad Burlesque,” a tune that crops up roughly halfway through the album and has all the makings of a great Eagles song, albeit with some more sophisticated chord changes thrown in for good measure.

 

Tunes such as “Temptation Eyes” and “The Last Time” are indicative of the album’s more centralized emphasis on keyboards, giving the proceedings the feel of big-budget production but maintaining the intimacy of a an indie/singer-songwriter project.

 

The most important piece of the puzzle, as it were, is that of the songs – and in terms of songwriting, The Scarlet Goodbye deliver the goods and then some with El Camino Adios. The record is packed with colorful and engaging lyrical imagery that offers up narrative cohesion while also remaining open to interpretation for the listener. The strength of the writing – both lyrically and musically – is further emphasized through clever musical arrangements and a thoughtful and poignant approach to production by Arundel.

 

“I think Jeff kind of sees idiosyncratic things in my voice, and it becomes part of the story and the equation,” Murphy says of working with Arundel as a producer. “That’s something I’m very thankful for.”

 

El Camino Adios is currently available to stream and purchase through TLG/Virgin Music Group.

 

 

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