Oldies (Single) by Berkley

Featuring ethereal lap steel from Margo Price and Orville Peck sideman, Luke Schneider, “Oldies” exorcises the memories that we’d rather forget but can’t escape.

The track blooms with hazy guitars and keyboard pads that nod to the 90s heyday of Bonnie Raitt. On top of it all, Berkley connects listeners to impressionist and detailed scenes ranging from the last encounter with a lover to looking up old friends online: "You deleted all your posts but your avatar’s still there/you’re in some kitchen eating pasta with someone who doesn’t care."

Each track from Berkley’s album deals with what comes and goes through the passage of time, but “Oldies” was specifically inspired by his favorite hometown radio station, KDZA Oldies 107.9. Berkley threads his memories to the decline of locally owned radio stations: "Right here, this spot on the map on summer vacation/that year, remember that, when the oldies used to play on a different station?"

With elements of 70s country and modern pop production, the song’s textures and intimate vocals position it somewhere in time between early Emmylou Harris and the latest Ethan Gruska. Berkley grounds listeners in the song’s lyrical and musical trip through time with a revelatory chorus: "What’s behind you is closer than it appears/future facing staring backward in the mirror."

The single’s b-side, available only the physical release, is a sound collage of modulated field recordings from Berkley’s hometown of Pueblo, Colorado. Berkley spent three days gathering sounds from locations significant to his youth, then ran the recordings through a vocoder. Over those recordings, he layered synthesizers and samples from a faux radio show he recorded with a boombox as a kindergartner.

With a voice that straddles delicacy and huskiness, Portland songwriter Berkley (born Andy Jones) takes the mantle from the 70s Laurel Canyon scene.

Jones’s signature progressive flourishes and expansive influences keep him out of the heritage revivalism pack as he ventures into new (for him) territory of country-tinged, folk-leaning tunes on his second LP Vaquero.

alwaysberkley.com