David Ramirez | Thomas Csorba

David Ramirez took a little time to get back to himself, and now he’s dead set on making music for himself—for the sake of the music... and nothing else. “I love all the records I’ve made in the past. But in making them, there was always the thought in the back of my mind of where and what it could get me. I made both creative and business decisions with a goal in mind... a goal that often never came. This time it was all about just the joy of making it, about having fun with it.”

The Austin, TX-based singer-songwriter—whose decades-long career has seen six full-length studio albums, three EPs, countless collaborations, and an illustrious supergroup project in Glorietta—spent a season of rest away from his focus on writing songs. In the wake of the end of a long relationship, he wanted to prioritize processing his grief as a human, not as an artist bleeding on the page.

“The last thing I wanted was to write a heartbreak record. So I stopped writing altogether, and I just waited until I saw my heart start coming back to life. I wanted the next thing to be hopeful and sweet and beautiful—a testament to music and my love for it.”

David’s new record All the Not So Gentle Reminders, which comes out in the late fall, is exactly what he was waiting for. The 12-song album is an expansive succession of dreamlike songs that tell his stories, yes—but more than anything lean into the possibilities of the trip that music can take us on.

“I’ve been a songwriter for a long time. I love words and stories. But this was about music. I wanted the long musical intros and outros [as on “Dirty Martini”, “Twin Sized Beds”, “A Bigger World”, and “Dreams Come True”] to contribute to the stories and be a part of them.”

The leadout track, “Maybe It Was All a Dream”, sets this theme of the ethereal and dreamy from the outset. It’s a three-and-a-half-minute musical tour de force—at first a simple synth line over a subdued drum machine that eventually morphs into a grandiose rollick of organ, drum rolls, and electric guitars. All the while, staticky, broken voices repeat the almost-haunting coda that gives the record its name. In the end, this “dream” is interrupted and punctuated by a recording of Ramirez’s own mother saying, “David... David... it’s time to get up."