Steve Walters Photo
Xavier Serrano.
“As a Puerto Rican,” the newest tune written and performed by New Haven-based singer-songwriter Xavier Serrano, begins with bare and gentle guitar chords and lyrics that are also bare but not as gentle: “Here I am / In the same position I recall from a few years ago,” he sings. “Except for this time around / I don’t feel so bad for myself / There’s something awfully silent within me.”
Serrano is in the process of completing his first solo album, Bell Chimes of Yesteryear, and preparing for a show at the Space Ballroom opening for the band Hawktail on April 25. Right now, for Serrano, it’s all about process on multiple levels. I spoke to him on a warm midweek evening in the back room at Three Sheets about his new album, old lessons, and the gift of presence.
Serrano described the 10-song album, which he is hoping to release in full by June or early July of this year, as a “self-document or journal of music to my own monologue or contemplation.” He had previously released two EPs in December 2017 and one in January 2018. He described them as “intimate” and “self-reflective.”
“Those EPs, the purpose of them was to just create” said Serrano. Before Serrano recorded them, the members of his band Kindred Queer had just concluded their time together to pursue their other projects separately, and he was “filled up with such existential questions and anxiety” that he felt “compelled to just create and pump out music whether it was really polished and thoroughly written or just sketches.”
One of the EPs was in fact titled Sketches for Cernunnos because “it was me just whimsically and poetically trying to put together a piece of an album just to put out.” Both EPs — the other titled Pierpont St. Ad Libs — were written in a day. “I had this fervor, this frenetic energy,” Serrano said.
The third EP, titled Dire Straits, was completed in two 12-hour stints over two days. The forthcoming new album, however, is its own concept, delivering a similar tone as the EPs, but standing alone.
“I put a lot more time and thought into it. It sounds very cheesy or silly but it’s kind of like a document of the past several years of my life in reflection as a diary, but also being more of what I came out of it with. That’s why I titled it Bell Chimes of Yesteryear, because it’s like the things of the past echoing in sound to me and what I got out of it, giving myself the lesson or the morale or the virtue that came through it. It’s about what I’ve learned.”
Serrano is charming but not cheesy, sweet but not silly, and is highly contemplative and thoughtful when asked a question. He has been playing guitar and writing songs for 13 of his 26 years. He avidly reads poetry and philosophy, specifically noting the ongoing influence “poetically, emotionally, and sentimentally” of the author Rumi. In fact, he came to the interview with a copy of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius in his hand and set it down on the table next to us. He mentioned he had also recently been reading The Art of Living by Epictetus.
“I’m always reading, especially lately. It’s almost unfocused. I’ve just been digging into so much.” He mentions Beat authors Jack Keuroac and Allen Ginsberg, citing their “attitude and social critique” as influences as well as Alan Watts. “He expands my mind, cracks the egg open for me so then I can find the subconscious and conscious mind of my experiences and reflections. I love him very much. And that goes for even just giving me a broader panoramic view of my own mind to be able to put it on to paper and how to properly piece it together.”
Musically Serrano cited Twain and Adrian Orange as more recent influences that “helped this record.” He also mentioned the music of Don McLean, with an easy laugh and smile, as someone he “wanted to emulate.”
“A lot of his songs were maybe cheesy at the time but I love his work so much. It’s very clear, and that’s what I wanted to get at, songs that were just comprehensible and palpable,” Serrano said. He also mentioned Nick Drake more than once as a continual influence on his musical life.
“It’s that spirit that I try to really just augment, just bring back to life. I love his work so much and especially given the tragedy of his death, being so young, and his music not necessarily reaching its notoriety that it should have then that it has now. It’s like I just wanted to grab the baton, as cliché as that sounds, but I love his work, especially his sincerity and the transparency that he had in a lot of his work poetically. I definitely try to emulate that through this record.”
I asked Serrano if he had a goal in mind with his songwriting. Did he wait to get a glimmer of something? Or did he set goals to write a song a day?
‘It’s all of the above” he said. “There’s no rhyme or reason, but generally it does tend to weigh in on the goal being ‘how can I give myself my own psychedelic stimulation?’ I’m playing the song, repeating it, and I’m traveling with the sound and speaking gibberish in order to kind of figure out what language is trying to spew out of me — just by a phonetic that makes no sense until I start to kind of interpret my own reason to spew out a consonant or certain vowel. Then I start to shape it like clay, and then I start to realize, ‘why do I keep trying to say this certain vowel or type of consonant?’ Then it starts to shape and mold into the sculpture in order to give me myself, my own alchemy of something tangibly sound, in order to give myself my own psychedelic transcendent moment.
“It sounds fucking flowery to describe it. It’s almost like this therapeutic thing to do in order to create this almost sound code, this phonetic sound code, in order to create this snap or synapse of the consciousness and ‘okay, there it is,’ and then you get this high from knowing what is tapping into the archetypical mind, the images and the symbolic meanings of what I’m talking about or stating.
“So that’s usually the goal, the goal is to give myself my own trip I guess, my own trip with the subconscious. Just to sum it up,” Serrano stopped himself and laughed.
Bell Chimes of Yesteryear album cover
“The sounds are from things of the past,” he said. “You could go about your daily routine and you can be in the present and you’re far separated by the years or months from something of the past that used to bring you qualm or just complication or dilemma, and you can be separated from it, and then you see something that reminds you and you can have a spontaneous recovery that’s like a chime. Then it just makes you feel all that emotion again, and it’s that ring, that resonating, that you have to process.
Serrano wrote all of the songs on the album and plays acoustic guitar “with some electric textures added here and there.” The album was engineered by Sam Carlson, who also played drums, shakers, and provided harmony on a couple of songs.
“This record is broader for me” he said. “I’m playing acoustic, there’s electric, there’s horns, there’s gonna be African Cuban fusion drumming involved and there will even be a group of people singing like choir in back of one of the tracks. It’s eclectic. I also wanted to get more into roots music like Americana and traditional folk and contemporary alternative indie rock.… I definitely dipped into those terrains, those soundscapes where I didn’t allow myself to go before.”
Was he still processing it all? “Yes,” he said “and that’s what these songs are. I wrote these songs based on the things of the past ringing in me still and having to let it process through.”
“But it is also a cautionary tale for my future self,” he added, “to not repeat the same mistakes.” He stood up and walked away for a moment.
While he was gone I picked up his Marcus Aurelius book and opened it to a random page. The following passage appeared, and I shared it with him: “Judge yourself entitled to any word or action which is in accord with nature, and do not let any subsequent criticism or persuasion from anyone talk you out of it. No, if it was a good thing to do or say, do not revoke your entitlement. Those others are guided by their own minds and pursue their own impulses. Do not be distracted by any of this, but continue straight ahead, following your own nature and universal nature: these two have one and the same path.”
“Yes! That’s it!” he said. He shouted with joy. “Yes!”
Serrano will be opening for Hawktail at the Space Ballroom on April 25. Find more information about that show here.