Kevin Bronson on January 5th, 2020

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So did you have a productive 2019? Eric Davis did. The L.A. singer-songwriter and frontman of the band First Fire wrote a song a day for the entire year. That’s 365 songs, if you’re counting, all documented here, and he has chosen 11 of them to appear on his new album “365,” out today.

(Davis is not the first artist we’ve covered to engage in such a mammoth undertaking. L.A. native Chris Snyder, working as Ace Reporter, wrote, recorded and released a song per day for the entirety of 2010. That herculean effort eventually yielded his album “Yearling.”)

Davis’ album of spare guitar- and piano-based music, mostly written while “holed up in my house in Pasadena,” as he explains in one of his videos, is comprised of evocative, unvarnished meditations on the world and his place in it. Perhaps it is best encapsulated by the album closer “The Garden,” a piano ballad (and song No. 365), in which Davis sings: “There might be a god / in the garden who waits / for artists like us /to plant all our pain.”

Take that thought into 2020.

||| Stream: “365” in its entirety

||| Live: Eric Davis celebrates his album release with a show tonight at the Bootleg Theater, with Jake Tittle and Connor Cook opening. Tickets.