Greg Mendez: Finding Extraordinary in the Ordinary

When I sit down to interview Greg Mendez on Zoom, we’re both enjoying some precious time spent at our respective homes—he’s in Philadelphia between legs of his fall tour; I’m in Cincinnati for the first time in months, on fall break from university. I ask how he’s been spending his short stretch of downtime. “Just working on music stuff,” he says. “I’m always working on something.” He then asks what I’ve been up to over my break—truth be told, the most exciting, creative thing I’d done to that point was make myself a Caprese salad after months of sustaining myself on a less-than-ideal college meal plan. Noticing the cat pacing back and forth on his lap, I tell him I’ve really just savored getting to hang out with my own cat. “That’s nice. You need that sometimes,” he smiles.

That this conversation with Mendez falls during my rare long weekend home completes a bit of a full-circle moment. I’m exactly where I heard his music for the first time: my bedroom, back in June of 2023, when a friend had sent me his then-relatively new self-titled album via Instagram. I hadn’t heard of Greg before, but my friend’s endorsement—“ok you would love this album”—and the evocative cover art—a sketchy, colored pencil drawing of Mother Mary, her eyes wide and imploring, hand unfurling towards heaven—were more than enough to sell me on giving it a listen.

I played the album the next day. I don’t remember how that particular day went—I know that I listened while doing my makeup on a slow summer morning, but I was probably just getting ready to lie around inside all day. I can, however, vividly recall the moment I first heard these words: “I still hope your name don’t appear in some obituary.” My hand paused whatever mindless task it was doing, and for a moment, the world was only me, my half-made-up reflection and Mendez’s crackling, exhausted warble—a voice aching to reveal so much more than the morbid prayer it exhaled. That prayer is delivered around the middle of the album’s final song, “Hoping You’re Doing Okay,” and it still lurches out at me, knife in hand, each time I cycle through the album. Mendez never actually sings the titular phrase—a well-meant, back-pocket consolation we’ve all heard to the point that it generally comes across as pretty stale and hollow—but the words he does offer, though less direct, convey pure, absolute compassion. It’s one of those uncommon lyrics that nails the strange, subtly devastating state of missing someone while knowing that distance is for the best—maintaining estrangement, but silently praying that they’re still somewhere out there, content above ground, praying that they’re doing okay.

With “Hoping You’re Doing Okay,” Greg Mendez fades out. There’s a final strum of bright acoustic guitar chords, and we’re left to bask in the warm embrace of the organ’s reverberant hum (this ending, too, brings about a full-circle moment, as the album awakens with that same instrument—albeit on a more somber, churchy note). The song ends the record in mourning, not only for a lost friend, but also for its narrator’s past self—a ghostly figure unable to convince himself of his own reality, to whom Mendez extends profound grace. It’s a battered eulogy for haunting memories hardly in the rearview, but there’s a quiet hopefulness for a brighter tomorrow in the guitar chords’ warmth and Mendez’s pleading last words: “It’s not the way that you are, it’s what you soon will be. Don’t go.”

It’s satisfying that the album (newly reissued on vinyl by Dead Oceans, the great indie label he recently signed to) ends in rebirth, or at least with that quiet determination to eventually fulfill “what you soon will be,” for it indelibly accelerated Mendez’s career. I was far from the only person hooked on his songwriting by its closing track—the album made best-of-the-year lists for publications including Paste, Pitchfork and Rolling Stone (and, just last week, Paste included it among the top 100 albums of the decade, so far), bringing Mendez unprecedented recognition.

Far from an overnight success, Mendez has maintained a presence in Philadelphia’s DIY scene for almost 20 years, and a compilation of early demos, initially released on MySpace, is still available on his Bandcamp with songs dating as far back as 2006. In the years between then and his self-titled release last year, Mendez not only struggled with and overcame drug addiction and periods of homelessness, but he also generated quite a prolific output. The abundant gems from these pre–self-titled releases deserve more attention than they receive(d), even after Mendez’s recent uptick in popularity. A couple of my recent favorites are the cool, shuffling “Stained Glass Boys,” released on & Gum Trash in 2018 and the sweetly voiced, euphorically harmonic “Long Division,” released on 2020’s Cherry Hell. Ultimately, though, Greg Mendez is his definitive full-length masterpiece to date—a meticulously arranged collection of songs spanning broad yet wholly cohesive soundscapes, from the swirling, heavy-lidded languor of “Shark’s Mouth” to the lo-fi pop magnetism of “Maria.” It presents a thorough introduction to his discography.

Mendez says his self-titled album’s critical acclaim “kind of changed everything”—not insignificantly, it’s granted him the financial stability to focus on his music career; he notes that this is the first time in the last 15 years he hasn’t had to do labor-intensive work to support himself outside of his vocation. But the accolades, he finds, aren’t as fulfilling as they’re cracked up to be. “It’s hard to feel like what you’re doing is not being noticed and appreciated,” he says, reflecting on his earlier career. “But, as far as the things I thought I was gonna feel good about—like getting ‘this’ in this press, or these lists, or these milestone accomplishments—they do feel good for a minute, and then it’s like anything else that’s external, where it doesn’t fill you up.” As with, I think, the most affecting and memorable artists, Mendez writes songs not for fame, but because he truly loves his craft (he also tells me, laughing, that he’s “just not that good at anything else”). “The best feeling to me,” he continues, “is just making a song, and listening back to it. And if I’m like, ‘I like this, this is good,’ that’s like a drug to me, too, but feels a bit more in my control.” The joy and fulfillment from songwriting, he’s realized, have been there all along: “In order to be a happy person making music, making stuff that you’re proud of has to be the payoff.”

Mendez has put in the work to hone his sound, and while I have no doubts that he’d still be making music had his self-titled album not taken off like it has, I’m personally glad that some spotlight came with his dedication. Wrapping his own head around its success hasn’t been so simple for Mendez. “I don’t think that I deserved it, necessarily,” he admits. “Maybe that sounds self-deprecating, but I just know so many people who are so talented—who I think are more talented than me, who do it for their whole lives—and something like that doesn’t happen. I just feel like I kind of hit the lottery a little bit.” I ask Mendez if he can put his finger on why so many listeners have felt such a potent connection to the album. “I don’t know, I just feel like they feel something in the songs—or they see themselves in it, or see somebody that they love in it, or something,” he suggests. Mendez encourages listeners to make what they will of his songs. “I don’t want to ever tell somebody what to get from it,” he says. “To me, the whole point of art is that the listener is the translator. What I as the writer put, like, it doesn’t even matter what it is to me. When you’re sitting at home and you put headphones on, I’m not there being like, ‘this song is about this,’ and I think that’s good.”

It isn’t difficult to connect with the flawed, sympathetic characters and disarming confessions in Mendez’s vignettes. Sure, we can’t literally relate to each story he tells—only so many of us have lived experiences similar to “Maria”’s crack den arrest or “Goodbye/Trouble”’s bleakly humorous, sing-song recollection of taking “a wallet chain to the head.” Regardless, the lucidity and tangibility of Mendez’s lyrics liken them to cracked, unpolished glasses through which we glimpse and come to understand our own pasts and presents, dependencies, relationships, and selves through. Inserting ourselves and our loved ones into the scenes Mendez narrates—miserably trudging around on a hot day in sweat-through clothes, worrying about saying something stupid and proceeding to overshare, picking up the stuff an ex left behind—is not merely easy, but nearly irresistible. There’s a visceral sense that Mendez is singing directly to you, bearing all—his wilted voice might not even expect you to listen, but the dynamism, vulnerability, and bluntness of his lyrics are singularly immersive. Take, for example, the first lines from “Maria”: “Every time you say you wanna know me, I get anxious.” They’re jarringly honest, comically relatable and immediately suck you into the ensuing anecdote “about some dumb shit”—Mendez begins telling it before you can even respond, but you would’ve said “yes,” anyway. In short, it’s one of the best opening lyrics I’ve heard of late.

Greg Mendez’s follow-up is the newly released, four-song EP, First Time/Alone. Notably, it’s also Mendez’s first release on Dead Oceans, one of several labels interested in signing him following the rave around his self-titled release, he says. From the first listen to lead single, “First Time,” it was clear that we wouldn’t be getting a Greg Mendez, part two—gone are its lush, full-band arrangements and painstaking layering. The most striking divergence, though, is the absence of guitar on “First Time” and “Mountain Dew Hell,” which instead center around simple, melancholy piano riffs; Mendez wrote and recorded them when a wrist surgery rendered him unable to play guitar for several months. “The EP was kind of like a test of who believed in it, in me, because it’s not really a traditional first larger indie label release in the way that it sounds and the way that it’s presented,” Mendez says. Though concise and relatively unadorned, it’s as piercing a record as any of Mendez’s previous releases; owing to its sparseness and raw, four-track recording, the songs ache under the weight of intimacy—admissions of loneliness are pragmatic yet heartbroken; pleas to a partner to be good for just one night come more from a place of exhaustion than ferocious desperation; the presence of ghosts from an undead past are as expected as a daily cup of coffee.

Mendez initially planned to further polish the EP—which was written and recorded late last summer and early last fall—but ultimately determined that adding anything to it would just be “making it shinier.” Determining whether a song is complete comes more from a gut feeling than an exact process for Mendez: “I just feel like there is some quality to something when it’s finished, and I don’t think it has anything to do with the process. I can’t describe it any way other than, like, ‘it’s just finished,’” he says. He specifically recalls that “Alone”—the third track on the EP, and the first song he wrote on guitar following his surgery—was originally intended to be more hi-fidelity and fully arranged, but with the encouragement from those he sent the recording to, he decided it was complete as-is. I couldn’t agree more: The bareness of the rough acoustic guitar strumming and Mendez’s brittle voice beautifully complement the lonesome, wintery landscape he evokes. It’s a song I wish I’d had to console me just this past winter, a time when I felt rather isolated and pathetically fragile—I’ve never felt more like I was “a lonely winter away from giving in.” When Mendez sighs and mutters that “the snowflakes are falling like lead on my head,” he encapsulates that queasy, dreadful sensation of just one inconvenience or irritation precipitating an emotional tailspin. There’s hardly a worse feeling than existing that far beyond a breaking point—when something as light as a snowflake could absolutely pummel you, or when you feel as helpless and “crushed as a moth when it’s dead.”

Heightened by his quavering warble and the tracks’ minimalist arrangements, it might be tempting to consider Mendez’s songs as threads unspooled right from his own head and heart. Naturally, his lyrics draw from his life, but to assume each song is a wholly autobiographical chapter would be inaccurate. His lyrics are more often patchwork collages of different memories, relationships and viewpoints, and he lets their meanings slowly reveal themselves to him instead of setting out to write about a specific topic. “My goal is not to relay my life experiences,” Mendez says. “My goal is to make a good song and a good record, and I’ll change stuff for that, to make it more communicative, to be more impactful. I’ll write from different perspectives, I’ll do all the things that somebody making a movie would do, or writing a book, where it’s not just like a journal.” Oh, and the one-dimensional trope of the chronically mopey singer-songwriter? You can forget it, in Mendez’s case. “Usually I feel really good if I’m making a song. And a lot of—as is obvious—the songs don’t really feel happy or anything,” Mendez laughs. “But I really love making them, and it brings me joy.”

As a songwriter, Mendez has a distinctive ability to capture universal feelings and imbue external surroundings with a preternatural humanity. On “Alone,” he laments that “the wind is yelling at me, ‘return to sin.’” It conjures memories of slogging around Columbus on dreary winter days earlier this year, when even the biting wind would slap me in the face—even the weather seemed to have it out for me. As Mendez points out, “everybody knows what the wind feels like,” and by keeping a close pulse on such universal, unremarkable things in his lyrics, he’s able to plumb the depths of the human experience. The inspiration behind the first lines of “Mountain Dew Hell”—“Everyone’s leaving, there’s nobody home, I’m all alone, drinking Mountain Dew”—was markedly undramatic: Mendez’s wife and friend were leaving the apartment to go out somewhere, leaving him alone, drinking Mountain Dew. Still, it reverberates with the pain of emptiness and isolation; the mundane hell it stages—a tormentingly quiet place, with only neon green fluid available for company—is much more relatable and affecting than some netherworld scorching with flames, rattled by guttural screams.

Accompanying the EP’s release is a new music video, directed by Luke LeCount, providing intertwined, visceral visual experiences for each song. Shot on 16-millimeter film, it resembles the content of a dusted-over video tape that only plays in your subconscious memory; the whimsical swirls and stars recurring throughout the video and, especially in the portion for “Mountain Dew Hell,”) make it feel like you’ve stepped inside a child’s fever dream. “‘Mountain Dew Hell’ felt like a birth of some sort, and the video kind of hammered that home,” Mendez says. “It’s kind of infantile and bizarre, almost like, things are just weird when you’re a kid, like, you’re experiencing the world in a very strange way because your brain’s not developed.” The video segment for the EP’s closing track, “Pain Meds,” fulfills what Mendez calls the songs’ “arc of life”: preceding its segment is a flash montage of earlier scenes, conveying a sense of “life flashing before your eyes.”

“Pain Meds” is, without a doubt, the EP’s weirdest song—unlike the unadulterated preceding tracks, it’s entirely pitched up. Pre-alteration, “it just didn’t feel good,” Mendez says. “The guitar felt really muddy and murky. It didn’t sound good. The song just felt too slow, and I was originally not gonna use it.” Once he started speeding it up—initially, just fragments meant for “little sound collage moments to tie the songs together”—everything clicked. “I turned the speed all the way up from the tape, and I started dumping, and I was like, ‘I don’t want to stop this. This feels good now,’” he recalls. “The guitar feels brighter and clearer, and the speed feels right. And something about the pitched up vocals made it just feel more emotional than before. The song kind of deals with losing a parental figure, so something about the voice being—I mean, it doesn’t literally sound like a child’s voice, but it gets going toward that. And so something about that, like, the emotion of the song, for me, just kind of clicked into place.”

Oddly enough, Mendez’s voice does sound more evocative—more revealing—when masked in a higher pitch, the grief submerging the lyrics is so acutely nauseating that level-headed, untouched vocals would be helpless to translate its immensity. Mendez’s voice seems unable to digest the agony of watching a loved one suffer while understanding the extent of their pain, hearing them beg for relief, seeing their “sorry and worn” face “every time I make coffee, every morning.” These lines from Frank O’Hara provide, I think, an illuminating foil to “Pain Meds”:

“oh god it’s so wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much”

It’s mystifying and amazing and terrifying how someone’s presence can make the most banal, everyday moments swell with heart, as O’Hara articulates here, and how their absence can transform those scenes into agonizing, haunted chores, as Mendez exhibits on “Pain Meds.” That shift is absolutely gut-twisting; it presents an anguish impossible to suffocate. It’s fitting, then, that in the footage for “Pain Meds,” Mendez sings staring straight at you, the camera quality significantly sharpened. You quite literally can’t turn away from his wilting voice and penetrating hazel eyes, which only his glasses establish distance from.

There’s a heartening bravery to how gentle the First Time/Alone EP dares to be—such as when Mendez concentrates his gaze on the camera while performing its most uncomfortably intimate song, or in the way he chokes up singing, “I know it’s not the fi-irst time you’ve seen me cry” on “First Time.” The bare-bone musical arrangements are innately frail and averse to any sugar-coating, but that means they have plenty of room to welcome you in, offering a sweetness and warmth apropos of nothing. One of my favorite scenes in the video is when a moth—the very thing Mendez professes to feel as crushed as—crawls around his guitar, as though it alone was Mendez’s target audience. I suppose that moment represents why I, at least, connect to Mendez’s music—it seems to distill the essences of my own worries and struggles, and instead of telling me to just move on, it extends tender, unconditional understanding. And, like that moth, I listen closely—especially at my most delicate, most crushable—and find beauty in that art of staying gentle.