Turning experiences into art
When Greg Mendez wrote the songs for the first EP on his new label, Dead Oceans, he couldn’t play the guitar. He had injured his right wrist, so he wrote the four songs for First Time / Alone on a keyboard, using his left hand. This wasn’t the first time an injury affected his music. While working a day job demolishing a house, he injured his head, which kept him on and off work for two years. Living on worker’s compensation, he wrote and recorded the songs for his 2023 self-titled album. Greg Mendez took off, and it was re-released a year later on Dead Oceans, giving the singer-songwriter a larger audience. Even better, after twenty years of playing music and posting his songs online, he could finally give up manual labor jobs and work as a full-time musician.
Beauty Land, released in May 2026, is his first full-length on Dead Oceans, home to notable indie artists like Phoebe Bridgers, Kevin Morby, and Mitski. While the music on the album is more polished, the themes in his songwriting remain: those of addiction, darkness, grief, and solitude. The self-titled album that brought him here received good press and was named one of the best LPs of 2023 by Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and Paste. But has this changed the Philadelphia-based musician? He recorded Beauty Land like his previous records in his two-bedroom apartment studio, playing most of the instruments. The songs are still short, all clocking under three minutes, with just voice, guitar, and keyboards. And Mendez has kept his shy-guy image, maintaining a low profile and brushing off much of the social media self-promotion that comes with being a modern musician. As of this writing, there is no biography on his website (gregmendez.net), no synopsis for his albums on Bandcamp, and he only recently joined Instagram after avoiding it for years. He instead uses online platforms to post his prolific output of albums and songs.
Greg Mendez got his start playing in punk bands while writing songs on the side and posting them on MySpace. He also became addicted to drugs and alcohol in his teens and twenties, and was homeless at one point. He got sober in 2017, around the time he began posting new music on Bandcamp. His songs often take him back to the dark periods of his life, which he crafts into inspiring messages, as he explained to David Renshaw for The Fader in 2024. “It feels good to take these things that were really traumatic and intense at the time and find out the worst parts about yourself and other people and turn that into something that is meaningful to me and to other people.” He’s made the full band album, like & Gum Trash in 2018, but has settled on being a lone troubadour for now, with his wife Veronica as his only bandmate. The out-of-nowhere success of Greg Mendez was a surprise, especially for a stripped-down, lo-fi record. “With previous records, I feel like I was cloaking things in a way, that I was less sure of the songs so the sound had to be blanketing it a little bit, or the lyrics had to be a little bit more like obscure so I wasn’t embarrassed or whatever,” Mendez told Brandon Stosuy for The Creative Independent. “And I think on the last record, it was just naked, and maybe that has something to do with it.”
Guitar and voice still drive most of the music on Beauty Land, although keyboards have a more prominent place in the mix. Like Greg Mendez, the cover art is vibrant, showing a shadowy figure roaming the night like the one he portrays in the video for the opening track “I Want to Feel Pretty.” Songs like “Looking Out Your Window,” deal with death, and on the lovely “Sunsick,” Mendez searches for forgiveness. “The lyrics feel more abstract to me than the self-titled, and they feel more like they span time,” he told Kayla Sandiford for The Line of Best Fit. “I feel like the self-titled was abstract in terms of the songs feeling like snapshots of a few moments in my life, or a very specific thing. With these songs, the perspective feels a bit different. It’s like a movie.” Now on a larger label, the offer to bring on a producer was made available, but Mendez went it alone as he previously had. “I’ve always just done stuff on my own for the most part, because I’m super particular,” he explained to Sandiford. “I know there are people who can do it better, but I would probably just make them tear their hair out trying to get an album to the place that I want it. And I can just tear my own hair out doing it.”
Beauty Land is his best album to date, and it should satisfy his fans and all new converts. After all his years in the weeds, how does he feel about his newfound success? “I don’t think that I deserved it, necessarily,” he told Anna Pichler for Paste Magazine. “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.” Mendez is the first to admit that he doesn’t know how to do anything else but music, and as his name grows larger, so will the quality of his albums with greater production and expanded use of instruments; maybe even strings. Still, while making Beauty Land, he fell back into some old habits. “I really fell apart in my life while making Beauty Land, because it was consuming me,” he told Kayla Sandiford. “People were not very happy with me and were just concerned. My ability to take care of myself as a person and all of my relationships suffered. I was doing things that were really bad for me. I was drinking again, I had to relearn that I was an addict, and I got pretty bad with that. I just learned that I need to have balance.” So many of Mendez’s songs come from his memories, and for his sake, the new songs he writes should come from shedding his demons and staying healthy and grounded.