S.B. singer/songwriter Todd O’Keefe’s new album, Salvador, is a gift basket of homegrown rock treats. The record showcases his music sensibility built over years as a session musician for acts such as Ray Davies, Jeff Beck, Elvis Costello, and Black Francis and with his own band The 88. Across nine songs that evoke folks like power-pop’s Alex Chilton or alt-rock’s REM, O’Keefe shines equally on rockers such as “Salvador” and the string-soaked “Truly.”
Channeling different characters through his lyrics, O’Keefe is on a Quixote-like quest for the good song. On Salvador, he wanders down as-yet-unexplored musical avenues, introducing electric guitar, piano, strings, and drums to a previously stripped-down sound. “I’m just trying to write a good song,” he said of the explorations, “but trying to write is the problem, and not trying is the problem.”
He rejects the ad-ready path of many modern songsters — “just one tone the whole time, trying to con the audience into a fraudulent emotion,” said O’Keefe. Instead, he explores the wideness of the human heart. “No one is comfortable all the time; no one is loving all the time — there’s love and hate, relaxing and uptightness, and expressing that through your art is the key.”