Daniel Rodriguez, Jesse Blake Rundle

Daniel Rodriguez

Whether it was personal heartbreak or the seismic shift in his daily life when exiting his longtime band, Elephant Revival, Daniel Rodriguez’s latest album, Harboring Pearls, is a snapshot of a singer-songwriter simply trying to navigate the choppy waters of existence to the best of his ability.

“I preserved my own sanity. I preserved my own integrity,” Rodriguez says. “There’s something about not being comfortable, knowing my integrity and ethics, knowing my path and where I’m headed — I’m fueled by not choosing to be comfortable.”

Captured by producer David Baron at his Sun Mountain, situated atop a ridge amid the ancient Catskill Mountains of Woodstock, New York, Harboring Pearls was co-produced by Wesley Schultz, lead singer for indie-folk juggernaut The Lumineers.

“Now? It’s just me and the storm,” Rodriguez says. “All the chips are in on this one piece of art. Am I crazy? Do I trust myself? What I am doing? It’s this lingering feeling that I have no idea where it’s headed, but I need to go wherever it’s headed.”

That internal, more so existential quest of self, of purpose and pursuit, lies at the core of Harboring Pearls. Numbers like of “El Dorado,” “Anything and Everything” and “Graduation” paint vivid indie-folk pictures of Rodriguez’s journey unfolding in real time.

“It’s about transcendence, and that’s been such a wild process,” Rodriguez says. “There’s been this pressure cooking with the songs. A lot of coal being compressing into diamonds.”

And what resulted was this steadfast platform of trust and radiance offered by Schultz, one where Rodriguez felt comfortable standing on, the culmination of those sessions being this cultivation of truth and sacrifice the lies within each selection of Harboring Pearls.

“You’re on your own and these are your pearls,” Rodriguez says of this latest batch of tunes. “And you’ve been harboring them for so long. It’s time to pass them out.”

Jesse Blake Rundle