So Where To Today?

In a world where culture is consumed in moments, as snippets, hooks and short, sharp dopamine bursts, dwelling and contemplating are becoming a rarity. The work of London-based, singer-songwriter Eli Carvajal is that deep, reassuring, contemplative breath. Continuing the same narrative line as his fourth album, Eat Shiitake Now, his latest release, Eyen Forever, is the artistic conclusion to a recent journey into affairs of the heart and foreign regions. It is another considered, introspective work drawing on classic singer-songwriter influences, telling deeply personal tales. The two albums tell parts of the same story at different times. Eat Shiitake Now captures the first year in Japan, recorded in-real-time and released while still in the country. It explores a whirlwind romance that took him there, only to end nine months into his stay. Over this time, he taught English, singing and songwriting in different schools around the city, recording the album in a bedroom overlooking Mount Fuji. Eat Shiitake Now was the result, capturing the emotions of the time with an inward, small-world calm; the cinematic scope of the sprawling metropolis; and the majesty of nature in equal measure. Eyen Forever is the aftermath, reflecting on Carvajal’s final year in Japan, musing on living away from home, far away from loved ones. In a moment of calm, this album expresses a time of groundedness between big changes. After Eat Shiitake Now’s telling of the arrival and rooting, this new record explores the unrooting and the farewell, as a stunning companion piece. Carvajal’s work has always captured deeply personal moments of flux drawn from his complex history. His family has a history of migration; sometimes to flee from persecution, sometimes not, always in search of a better life. He was born in New York City to an American mum and British-Chilean dad, with his twin brother (whom many of the most recent songs are about). At one year old, the move was made to London where Carvajal grew up. Now aged 30, he first started playing bass in a power trio with his twin and best friend from primary school, playing standard covers from the Rolling Stones and David Bowie. Every Sunday, in their drummer’s Shepherd’s Bush bedroom, a shy, 13-year-old Eli was transformed. Not understanding that the key of songs could be changed, he attempted to sing all the songs at the original artist’s pitch, yelping, squealing and shouting to reach Bowie’s high notes, growling out Iggy Pop. Finally bored of ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, creative restlessness led to original compositions at the age of 14, with the band starting to gig around London a year later in 2010. There was immediately a desire to do more and explore music in a wider sense. From a household filled with the music of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and the Beatles, Eli had tried to remember the lyrics to Fab Four tracks as early as year three in primary school. As the band took off, he taught himself to play the guitar and piano, understand music theory and write songs. Building on this, at 18 he studied Music at the University of Manchester, moving back to London in 2016 with a formal music education, only to break up the band with his twin and start releasing music as a solo artist in 2017, transitioning from the Talking Heads-style new wave sound of the band to the in-depth lyrical work we hear today. That year, the debut acoustic EP ‘Spark’ came as a rough work from an artist finding his voice in this new space. Between 2020 and 2021, Carvajal self-recorded and released three albums he says he is “proud of”, as the voice was found - Incubabies (2020), Maiden Name (2021) and Feeling (2021). All three start to perfect the autobiographical storytelling at the heart of Carvajal’s music. Incubabies is a deeply personal exploration of family history, a concept album weaving songs around a 1996 cassette recording of his mother having her fortune told in New York City. The fractured, emotional vocals weave tales of the family’s history of migration, his parents’ meeting, their childhoods and the twins’ births to captivating effect. Maiden Name covers a move to Bristol at the tail end of 2020, songs of isolation and renewal at the end of a six-year relationship, captured as the year turned around. It’s a lush album with a lot of instrumentation all played by Carvajal (bar bass on one track from his best friend and old bandmate), who also recorded and mixed it. The third album, Feeling, is an album composed entirely of first takes, recorded directly onto cassette tape. The strict “first take” rule even applied to any overdubs on the recordings, creating a release that lets go of perfectionism and embraces spontaneity. It’s a release that revels in the moment and realism. Recorded in a bedroom with the windows open, in the mix you can hear trains coming into nearby Bristol Temple Meads station and bird song from the garden. The elements of all these releases can be found on Eat Shiitake Now. The songs are presented in the order they were written and recorded immediately. You can hear a whirlwind relationship unfold through the songs, a marriage just four months into dating, his move to Japan and the realisation that the pairing was doomed, before its eventual end. It’s all documented in real time, written and recorded as it happened. It’s an intense listen. While Japan offered a thematic backdrop to the album, it also offered new musical ideas to the process with a vintage Japanese drum machine and synth purchased in dollar stores being woven into the acoustic classicism. In many ways, Eat Shiitake Now nods to Japan’s head-on collision of tradition and futurism, all the while keeping close to the personal musings from within. It’s full of images of life in Japan. It’s sad and painful, but the ending offers hope in rebirth. Eyen Forever looks into the aftershocks of this period, reflecting on the breakup of another relationship he was in after the whirlwind marriage, but also his twin’s issues with mental health and Carvajal’s own powerlessness to help. The two aspects draw parallels to situations happening to you, around you, that you feel part of but ultimately disconnected from. Both albums were recorded in the same small bedroom in Higashikitazawa, Tokyo, in Carvajal’s little apartment on a hill with Mount Fuji in the far distance. Eyen Forever is a final diaristic note to his time in Japan - capturing the atmosphere, time and place in granular detail at such a unique period of his life. As such, the record features various sounds from Tokyo, including the 5 o’clock bell that rings out every day across the country (testing their early warning systems for natural disasters) and the cicadas that sing deafeningly throughout the summer. And here sits Carvajal closing out his twenties, having already lived a lifetime of tales, but with so much more to unfold. There’s so much more to tell, and where his journey will take him is anyone’s guess; in its wake, we will get more classic aural diaries to cherish.