Jerry David DeCicca’s 5th solo album, New Shadows, is a literary-goth, avant-Americana meditation, surreal and ruminative, featuring David Hidalgo and Steve Berlin (from Los Lobos), guitarist Jeff Parker, tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, trumpeter Aquiles Navarro (from Irreversible Entanglements), singer Rosali Middleman (Rosali), and composer/sound archivist, Brian Harnetty. New Shadows peaks into corners where interior and exterior worlds collide, where miniscule revelations can be found in the darkness of ourselves and our community: lost children, unheard prayers, bugs, money, depression, romantic relationships, regret, and Zoom funerals, all become a lens for self-reflection.
The production (by Don Cento and JDD) is modeled after DeCicca’s favorite early 80’s albums (Lindsey Buckingham’s Law & Order, ZZ Top’s Afterburner, Robert Palmer’s Clues, Lou Reed’s New Sensations,) while the songs’ architectures and pathos lean more towards Warren Zevon, Townes Van Zandt, and John Prine - all these record-makers and songwriters are embedded in DeCicca’s DNA, having seen them, and in some cases met them after gigs, when his brain was still developing between the ages of 13-19 years old. The virtual collaborators are the musicians whose kept him company while isolated in his rural town, Bulverde, TX: Brian Harnetty’s Many Hands, Rosali’s No Medium, Irreversible Entanglements’ Who Sent You?, James Brandon Lewis’s Jessup Wagon, Jeff Parker’s JP’s Myspace Beats and Suite for Max Brown, and the Los Lobos discography. New Shadows isn’t so much about DeCicca’s new discoveries, as it is the penumbrous reminder of what’s always been there.
