Jerry David DeCicca :: “Cardiac Country”
Photo: Cormac O’ Connor
“Cardiac Country” is not just the 6th studio album from Texas-based singer-songwriter and producer Jerry David DeCicca, but a tonal testament to the subconscious space of health, melodic mortality, and how fragile our futures can ultimately be. Written and recorded only a few months before being diagnosed with a leaky aortic valve that called for immediate open heart surgery, one would say DeCicca is way too young being having just turned 50 last summer, for such an experience, but never too old for life’s liberating lunacy that guarantees an endless trove of depth, enlightenment, and in the end, brave stories to be told for those in favor of adventure. “Cardiac Country” is DeCicca’s existential expression on understanding some of our unique journey’s most diverse and chronically cryptic messages, while his material, subjects, and overall narrative were already established. An epic empire of emotion and internal intensity, the songwriter wrote the entirety of the album in his living room in Bulverde, Texas, in just a few weeks. Having tapped into something rather cosmic and critically complex, in just a short period, while simultaneously pulling from the likes of Bruce Cockburn and Lee Dorsey, DeCicca hadn’t a clue that his life was about to take a dangerous detour down a riveting road filled with overwhelming obstacles, folders of fear, and the intensity of the imagination working against itself. A year after his surgery, the musician took off to Europe with a master of tonal theatre, Bill Callahan, and Jim White to live life to the fullest.
“If the heart is a metaphor and a muscle, both versions found themselves in my songs like never before. I’m not much of a woo-woo guy, so hearing my own music this way is something I want to reject, but also can’t deny.”
Photo: Mark Eitzel
Near death is one thing, riding as a passenger in a belligerent Buick from Hell, while blowing through the lights heading straight towards the universal unknown, is a whole other thing. “I listen to these songs now and try to make sense of what my body was telling my pen and guitar, dissecting the information my brain didn’t yet know,” says DeCicca about the overall retrospective of being in the presence of the self without any watermark, or indication of what’s to come. Just a subconscious storyteller leaning into the wind with his full weight, trusting the biblical balance of life to guide him through his biggest adventure yet. Surging through the soundscape of the album’s poetically polished track listing, DeCicca brings his best work to the sonic surface. With numbers like “Dripping Man,” “Knives,” the terrifying tone of “Old Hat,” and the album’s fundamentally fantastic opener “Long Distance Runner,” DeCicca caught lightning in a bottle, and then brilliantly smashed it against the ego, releasing its fragile force with a strength summoned somewhere deeply spiritual, and now sacred. In the words of the late, great Fred Neil, “But that's the other side of this life I've been leading. And that's another side to this life.”
