Andres Miguel Cervantes

Speakeasy Studios SF

Andrés Miguel Cervantes brings back his Western Noir desert soundscapes on October 31 with the release of his second full length album, Songs for the Seance, released on independent label Speakeasy Studios SF.  Born and raised in San Diego, while calling the SF Bay area home, Cervantes’ music is influenced by songwriters Leonard Cohen, Townes Van Zandt, Fred Neil, and singers Vicente “Chente” Fernandez, George Jones and Merle Haggard. Cervantes’ lyrics and songcraft are distinctly his own, with beautiful haunting images of landscapes both internal and external delivered with his virtuosic folk guitar finger picking style that is as if Bert Jansch met Mississippi John Hurt on the crossroads of a dark desert road.      

Songs For The Seance is a meditation on the collection of memories that live inside us all, experienced, dreamed, or inherited from our ancestors. It touches on themes of identity, the need for belonging, loss, isolation, and hope. Songs that soar through haunting noir soundscapes, about communicating with our ghosts, facing what haunts us, and knowing that “there’s some winning in staying alive.” 

Songs For The Seance is a moving and expansive follow up to Cervantes’ debut and internationally acclaimed album The Crossing.  Cervantes returns to the studio with producer Alicia Vanden Heuvel to record, once again, to Otari ½” 8 track, an analog process, with the contributions of live bandmates Jacob Aranda (pedal steel, violin), Jessie Leigh Smith (harmonica, vocals), Raphi Gottesman (drums), Alicia Vanden Heuvel (bass, vocals, percussion), Hall McCann (lead guitar, vocals), Graham Norwood (guitar), Conor Riley (piano) and Noelle Fiore (vocals).  

Songs For The Seance was born from Cervantes’ meditative process of songwriting, crafted while living and traveling throughout the southwest, in the Mojave and Sonora deserts along the coast to where the Pacific ocean touches the bays of San Diego and San Francisco.

“I’ve always felt like I fall into a deep meditative place to communicate with my memories, with loved ones, with places, when I’m listening for what the song wants to say. Like so many say, the song crafts itself. I’ve spent hours thinking I’ve been writing one song, when suddenly something else surfaces and the song completely changes into another form.”

“A Silver Wind”, the album’s first single, was inspired and written on a drive Cervantes took through the high deserts of California’s Mojave during the pandemic.  Landscape frequently plays a crucial role inspiring the expansive space in the Cervantes’ songs. Producer Vanden Heuvel and Cervantes frequently refer to this sonic relationship between the music and landscape in Cervantes’ compositions as “Western Noir.”  “A Silver Wind” was recorded live to tape using just two microphones, reflecting space and the intimacy of Cervantes’ craft through this live performance.  One can feel the open spaces, the night sky, the expanse of road and vistas, reflected in Cervantes’ dramatic yet open guitar finger picking, as the sonic landscapes he creates mirror the western desert he grew up in.

“I have a lot of childhood memories of driving into Mexico with my family, staring out the back seat windows of my dads Monte Carlo as we drove into the Sonoran desert, on our way to his hometown of Pueblo Yaqui. These desert drive memories still flicker in my mind like a cinema drive-in. There is a part of me that is still there, staring intensely out the backseat window, as far as I could see in hopes to discover something more than meets the eye… With “A Silver Wind,” I wanted to capture that feeling of reflection that one gets when driving through the vastness of the desert… it can make one feel insignificant, but vital, all in the same moment. The loneliness, or the solitude, whichever seems to be present, is part of what this song  explores. That we are with the moments that we experienced, and the dreams that may have never come to pass. There is something that calls me to the desert, there is a part of me that always resides there. It’s a refuge and a sanctuary for my soul.”

The 2nd single and title track, “Songs For The Seance” is a full band number, opening with the soaring notes of Aranda’s pedal steel over Cervantes’ expressive finger picking, as the song kicks into a driving groove provided by Gottesman’s shuffling drums and Vanden Heuvel’s bass.  The song is a haunting meditation on loss, death, facing the great beyond, a classic song about standing at the crossroads, wondering if making a deal with the devil would bring back a lost loved one.  “I saw the devil’s eyes in me, they sang me songs with a melody, songs for the seance… “ Cervantes’ poetic guitar stylings give a nod to British folk guitarist Bert Jansch, blues and folk greats like Elizabeth Cotton, yet through a haunted and delicate finger picking style distinctive of Cervantes.  The reverb and tremolo laden electric lead guitar Norwood provides adds an eerie element complimenting the soaring female backup vocals, reflecting the lament felt in the lyrics.  The music feels like it’s out of a gothic western soundtrack, with a tension and unease signature to Morriccone soundtracks, with a dark, eerie quality, or spectral dread as Cervantes’ takes us to a place where we can feel him reaching out, into the ether, beyond what we can see.   “Out here I hear her, she calls my name, out here…I know she’s gone.”  

There is a humanity to the songs on the album, in which love for friends, family, and empathy for others is present throughout.  “If You Need Love” which speaks to the stillness of being there when someone else is struggling, is a touching song, and McCann’s beautiful vocal harmony adds emotional depth.  The song is a reminder one isn’t alone, and is about being there for our friends. “Your sad desert eyes look to mine, and cannot lie.  If you need love, call my name.”  The outlaw country groover “Kool-aid Kid” explores the duality of the dark side, staying up all night, with friends, or alone…. “crossroads, casinos, that shit’ll keep you up all night.”  Thinking about where you came from with the lyrics “hell ain’t so bad, if it’s where you’re from.” How one wrestles with the dark side, and reflecting on where these aspects of our personalities come from, be they inherited through experience, or built through our lives’ experiences. Again, a struggle, internal and external, reflected in song. 

“New Friend” is a classic outlaw country blues number that kicks the door in with the full band and a blazing vocal duet with Jessie Leigh Smith, asking “Who’s your new friend, keep you up at night?” There is a fierceness to this banger of a track, which asks the protagonist “Where you been? What you seen? Do you know what you’re conjuring?” The tone of these enigmatic questions, in which we aren’t sure if it’s a love interest or the devil, or maybe even that the protagonist has made a deal with the devil, is brought home by the driving rhythm of this song and the female backing chorus which all adds to the spectral overtones in the song.  Fitting that the album cover art for Songs For The Seance is an adaptation of a Ouija board, emphasizing this feeling of eeriness. 

“A Thing For Change” reflects many of the central themes of the album. This haunting acoustic ballad features Cervantes’ guitar finger picking with his ethereal and masterful vocal performance front and center.   In this intimate and stripped back song, Cervantes’ speaks of how “This world is old, it loves its pain… and it don’t care a thing for change.” The song speaks to reaching for hope, in a world that is built on the ashes of history.

In Cervantes’ words, the song “explores the themes of the dark night of the soul, a period of intense spiritual crisis and transformation, characterized by feelings of emptiness, isolation, and a loss of meaning in life.  The loss of our purpose and Identity. When we feel powerless and abandoned by our faith. The knowledge we gather during this period is vital to our pursuit for what is good. The understanding that we all face this dark night together. ” 

Album closer “Sis and I” speaks to childhood memories and the loss of innocence we often face growing up, …“Mother’s singing at the window, sis and I climbing in the trees, never was there trouble ma couldn’t handle, til sis and I got to our teens” The song reflects on the struggle to survive, and seeking solace in the knowledge that there is “some winning in staying alive.”  As simple as the sentiment sounds, the complexity of navigating life’s struggles through the lens of the soul is a theme present throughout this beautifully crafted and deeply moving album. 

Cervantes’ songwriting on Songs For The Seance explores themes of the soul, the love we feel, the dark and the light, of feeling haunted, unsettled, and yet seeking hope.  A reflection on collective and ancestral memory, inherited and lived experience, in our families, with our loved ones. 

Songs For The Seance comes out October 31, 2025, on burgeoning independent label Speakeasy Studios SF, owned and operated by Alicia Vanden Heuvel.   Cervantes has given us a beautiful and heartfelt album that breaks new ground in the tradition of American western country folk music, taking the listener on a poignant, poetic, thoroughly relevant, and well-crafted musical journey.