644 days and a pandemic after his third album release, singer-songwriter Gab De La Vega has a new acoustic single out, called “We Could Be Anything”, an hymn to the importance of human relationships. The song comes with a music video he personally created, directed, edited… ah, and filmed… in reverse!
Comments Gab: “I wanted to shoot a video myself, something simple yet effective, that matched the mood of the song. So I decided to shoot from the end to the beginning and then reverse, to give the footage a weird looking aspect and a bit of a twist to the simplicity of the video. I admit it wasn’t as easy as you might think to get all the sequence right!”
Gab De La Vega presents it as an uplifting acoustic song, which his label Epidemic Records is releasing as a digital single on all platforms, but it’s also going to appear on a vinyl compilation featuring other punk-rock-fueled singer-songwriters such as Jesse Wagner (The Aggrolites), Lenny Lashley (Street Dogs), Path, Finny McConnell (The Mahones) and Vic Ruggiero (The Slackers). The compilation is released by Italy’s Out of Control Produzioni and should see light in December 2021.
After going full band and releasing “Beyond Space And Time” in January 2020 (great timing!), Gab De La Vega got to play a handful of shows with this line up, to then stop… like the whole World did for a long time.
Plans, shows, tours were painfully disrupted but after a while he resumed his live activities with acoustic performances, which is a format he knows well, since it’s been his go-to thing since the early days of his solo career.
In this frame comes “We Could Be Anything”, written and recorded in a short span of time in May 2021. If the pandemic could have done anything good, it might be the spark of cathartic creativity that some musician found to process this event.
Gab De La Vega comments: “I wasn’t sure if what’s happened in the last 1.5 years was going to affect my songwriting, especially in lyrics, but it made me realize how important human relationships are, once more. So that’s what this song is about. When I sat down to write the lyrics, these words came out flowing naturally. I think I had to let my feelings out. I tried to write an “uplifting”, simple and direct song. I like how English uses “could” both as past tense and conditional. Things that were and things in potential.
A single take on guitar and a couple of takes on the vocals. Very simple, natural approach both in the songwriting and in the studio. I needed this to be a natural release for my feelings, spontaneous and simple, maybe even a bit “naive”. After all these months of worrying, overthinking, etc, I needed something like this.”
Full band shows as Gab De La Vega and The Open Cages resumed in late September and more are coming; same for his acoustic performances, which are in fact going to take Gab De La Vega in Germany at the end of November / Beginning of December after a handful of shows in Austria in the beginning of October.
2022 should be the year of full band and solo tours at full speed, but the new year will also see a new album, for which Gab De La Vega is already working and paving the way.
