photos provided by danny garcia.

Danny Garcia, alias Reverend Baron, ducks my initial attempt at neatly labeling his music.

“I don’t know what the word is to explain it,” he tells me from a sunny living room in East LA. “It’s not soul, it’s not folk, it’s not rock, but it sort of has some of those things, it’s mellow, it’s melodic.” He pauses, careful not to fence himself in, “and the singer-songwriter thing is a tag but that one feels funny, so.”

I feel conflicted subjecting his sound to the prosaic task of having to account for itself. He traces his influnces: Dylan and McCartney. Townes Van Zandt and Lou Reed. Caetano Veloso and the Mexican composer and performer of boleros Agustín Lara. “Crafty musicians,” he says, “who write these perfect little songs with familiar structures and familiar melodies, but always with some little twist.” “Let The Radio Play”, one of Reverend’s most played songs on Spotify, is a homage to those disparate influences — a perfect tune with some little twist, a soothing melody with dusty vocals echoing a Dylan-esque croon. Part of the pleasure of listening to Reverend is finding yourself entranced by his visions of the cityscape, patrolling valleys and back alleys and East LA liquor stores, stringing you along for the ride by witholding a chorus and teasing out a few sexy refrains.

Danny spent this past September traveling and playing a few shows in Chihuahua and Mexico City. “Maybe because I have been conditioned to travel since I was very young, I realized I have to do it or I become bored and uninspired. It’s like a drug or something. It gets you off your normal path.” Danny Garcia was once upon a time Danny Garcia, traveling the globe as a professional skater, revered for his effortless style and iconic part in Habitat’s Mosaic (2003). He reinvented himself as Reverend Baron with the release of his first ep, Pheasant, in 2014.

Since then, Danny has become a proficient multi-instrumentalist, engineer and producer of his own and other artist’s music. One night at Footsies, a dive bar on Figueroa St in LA, Danny spotted Mike Collins of Drugdealer having a beer. “When I saw him I was like ‘Yo, I like your record.’” He went on to tour with Drugdealer in 2018 and 2019, collaborating with them on their second studio album “Raw Honey”. “I get it,” he says of Mike’s experimental project, which features artists like Ariel Pink, Weyes Blood, and Jackson MacIntosh, “it was easy for me to jump in and get down with that stuff.” That stuff is the lawlessness of two self-taught musicians from Los Angeles, finding a means to tell original narratives through raw experimentation with musical forms.

Reverand explains his evolution as an untangling from the technicalities of making music and forgoing to understand the logic of his creations. “It takes practice getting in touch with feelings, those amorphous things. I had to learn how to shut down a certain part of myself while playing so other things could come up. I had to learn to trust my instincts.” He tells me about accessing the unconcious — how he is inviting something more abstract into his sound.  “Not that long ago,” he says, staring beyond his phone into the distance, “I decided I am going to stop writing question marks in my notebooks.” The remark strikes me as an honest attempt of his to reveal a part of himself and his process. “There are no love songs on From Anywhere,” citing his fourth studio album from 2022, “I don't know what that means, but when I realized that halfway into recording I decided I would keep it that way.”

From Anywhere is dripping with woozy nostalgia and searching lyricism. True poetry is an enigma, not a puzzle, I think. It doesn’t have to answer for itself. It doesn’t even have to be understood. It just has to strike a nerve. I stop pestering Danny for explanations.

When I bring up the future of Reverend Baron, he mentions being recently inspired by the record Solo in Rio 1959, by the Brazilian architect of bossa nova, Luiz Bonfá. “He’s a virtuoso guitar player and he can really hold his own, but I want to do something that simple, one guitar, maybe I go to a destination and do it in a week or something.” Like Bonfá, Danny is able to capture a fleeting mood in song.

He is currently gearing up to record his next studio album. “I’m not going to do it at my studio, it’ll be a shift. I’m working on it with a few other artists. It will be the first one I don’t do solo.” He won’t specify which aritsts he is collaborating with. I try to let some of Danny’s curious magic rub off on me, leaving questions unanswered and letting the ether do the talking.