Art pop songwriter and singer Ethan Gold’s new album Earth City 1: The Longing, is now on several best-of-2021 lists. This cranks the dials on a burst of creativity that followed Gold’s head injury, which shifted his output to instrumentals and film scores during his recovery. After completing praised scores for Don’t Let Go and The Song of Sway Lake which featured John Grant and The Staves singing Ethan’s songs, Gold’s back at the mic and on stages, having closed 2021 on RadioEins in Berlin, picking up where he left off after his debut Songs From a Toxic Apartment first put him on the map of the underground, praised in Pitchfork (“emotions delivered with a glaring legibility”), the Sunday Times London (“essential new music”), and elsewhere. He’s coming back far stronger than ever. Gold is an artist that doesn’t fit in easy categories, except perhaps for the conflicting moods and ambience of the late night. Like many of us, he’s fought his way past demons of a traumatic childhood, and then repeated some of those patterns as an adult. But he always finds a way to turn it into art. A yearning for the divine runs through much of his work whatever shape it takes. Words like this are often used: “Unearthly… stunning. This is about expressing the voice of God through the only means that we have to on this humble planet of ours” (Skope). He’s transformed a life with obstacles into music that points us towards a better world. Paul McCartney tells a story of dreaming the most popular song in history, “Yesterday”, though famously revealing the lyric was originally ‘scrambled egg’ when he first woke up. Ethan Gold, who post-injury writes half of his music while sleeping, comes from this lunar tradition, which he sometimes calls “listening.” Though Gold’s darker spirit is perhaps more Lennon than McCartney. Indeed Gold’s anthems “Our Love is Beautiful”, “Not Me Us” and “Never Met a World Like You” have been compared in international press to Lennon, and Gold’s more raw expressions to Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen. Gold also walks that edge between pain and the revelations, peace, and wisdom that can come through suffering. Ethan Gold was raised in San Francisco in the hangover of the hippie times, in a family that was in near-constant flux, dramatically punctuated by the death in a helicopter of his mother and her boyfriend, the iconic concert promoter Bill Graham. Gold settled in Los Angeles and first made his name producing artists, including the debut album of Elvis Perkins Ash Wednesday, while moonlighting as a bass player, and working on film scores including for his brother Ari’s student Academy Award-winning short “Helicopter” and debut feature Adventures of Power. He’s continued his wide-ranging creativity by directing videos for his own songs and for other artists, and performing poetry around Los Angeles; his poems were recently published in the Telephone anthology and Tablet Magazine. He’s currently recording part two of the Earth City trilogy, which picks up from the contemplation and romance of The Longing and moves into the kinetic excitement of the global city. This next album is scheduled for release at the end of 2022.