Singer/songwriter Rebecca Pidgeon will be releasing her 11th full-length album Songs of L.A. on February 23, 2024, in CD and digital formats. The album expresses Pidgeon’s longtime “fascination with filmmaking, both its beauty and its seamier exploitative side.” The song and video for “Cry” are out now.
The new songs were composed with long-time writing partner David Batteau, and they focus on figures like the pioneering female aviator Poncho Barnes, who flew stunts in Hell’s Angels and Betty Page, the 1950s pin-up girl who mysteriously disappeared at the height of her popularity.
Sonically, Songs of LA is Rock-oriented, a return to Pidgeon’s 1980s Indie Rock origins. She wrote several of these songs on autoharp, giving them a jangly sound.
Rebecca Pidgeon says:
Songs of LA is a journey through the insanity of this city and of Hollywood, but sonically it’s very alive and upbeat. It’s got a buzzy energy with some darkness underneath.
Pidgeon co-produced Songs of LA with Fernando Perdomo, the producer and multi-instrumentalist she worked with previously on the Comfort section of her 2019 album Sudden Exposure to Light/Comfort. Perdomo also engineered the album and played a variety of instruments including bass, guitar and keyboards. Rebecca Pidgeon herself played guitar, bass and keyboards and sang. Two other frequent collaborators rounded out Pidgeon’s band: LA-based drummer Matt Tecu and violinist Andy Studer.
Rebecca Pidgeon has been an actor as long as she’s been a songwriter. She formed her first band, the Folk-Rock Ruby Blue, while in her early 20s in Edinburgh, about the same time she acted in her first film. She has continued, ever since, to make albums in between films and television series and plays.
Pidgeon says that, for her, acting and making music have always overlapped, and that they sometimes can come from the same place.
She explains:
For instance on this record, I was writing and creating scenarios, little worlds that I could inhabit from my own imagination or from things that I’m inspired by, either movies or artists or stories I’ve read. It’s the same impulse as wanting to inhabit a character, which is at the root of the desire to act. These songs don’t come from a personal place like some writing I do, but I found the stories fascinating and wanted to explore Los Angeles, and part of its history.
