Guest Blog & Song Premiere: David Ramirez, “An Introduction”

Veteran singer-songwriter David Ramirez (who Paste once called “The best damn songwriter you don’t know yet”) has a new album Apologies, which drops August 28. It was produced by Ramirez and Brian Douglas Phillips, and mixed by Danny Reisch (Okkerville River, Shearwater, Kathleen Edwards, White Denim). Take a listen to the album track “An Introduction” below, and read Ramirez’s guest blog below.

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When I began writing for this upcoming album Apologies I made a conscious decision to write about things outside of Love and Relationships. My Strangetown EP is probably what I’m best known for and I didn’t want to duplicate the same emotions for this next record. I wanted to hit on subjects I’ve shied away from in the past. Maybe I was too scared to write about new things or maybe I wasn’t in a place to be able to communicate clearly my thoughts on new subjects but either way, in the past, I stayed in pretty safe territories by mostly writing about Heartbreak.

“An Introduction” was one of the first born of this batch of songs. I was raised in the Southern Baptist church and after graduating high school went to a small Christian University. I have no ill feelings by how I was raised but I do have a lot of unresolved feelings by what I was taught and from what I saw. After dropping out of college I started playing, writing, and recording more than I ever had. Doing this led me to a lot of places I’d never been and introduced me to new walks of life I’d not been familiar with. Both “church scene” and “bar scene” taught me a lot but both also brought me down in ways. This song is not an anti-church/anti-God song. It’s also not a pro-church/pro-God song. “An Introduction” is in a lot of ways a rhetorical question to an answer I think deep down we all know and believe. Truth exists everywhere. By no means, is everything true, but Truth can be seen and found in all things.

This was a difficult song to write. At least for this moment in my life I’m not a believer in pushing agendas through art. I write what I think and feel. I don’t write to sway people to come to my way of thinking. Working through a lot of these lyrics was quite the challenge with trying to find the balance of speaking my mind but not pushing my opinion. It’s not so much that I was afraid of offending, that in itself doesn’t bother me, I did though want to be heard clearly.

The rest of the album trudges through new territories as well. I think the best way to describe Apologies is to feel as if you’re eavesdropping on my inner monologue. It’s personal and very intimate. Be gentle.