Headline : It’s just Greg Mendez and his music

Read more from the original article on here at www.thefader.com.

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For many DIY artists, one of the biggest challenges is finding a balance between paying the bills and being creative. The thing that funds recording and live performances is the very same thing that keeps you too busy to write or too tired to practice. For Greg Mendez, his side job as a laborer in his hometown Philadelphia proved to be an unlikely godsend. “I smashed my head into a piece of metal,” he says of the accidental injury he sustained while demolishing a house. Workers compensation allowed him to spend time at home writing and recording his self-titled album, a collection of nakedly honest and gently strummed indie rock confessionals first released in 2023 and re-issued this month via his new label Dead Oceans (Mitski, Phoebe Bridgers).

That time at home was key to the creation of Greg Mendez, though he is keen to stress that he was legitimately fucked up at the same time. “I kept going back to work and getting re-injured,” he says from his Philly apartment. “That’s the thing with manual labor. They're not just paying you for your time, you're getting paid for the damage to your physical health.” Mendez is still at a level in the music world where he requires a second job, though these days he’s switched to the far less precarious position of assistant at a local photography studio.

Greg Mendez was an introduction to Mendez’s world for many, though he has been quietly sharing music with the world since 2006 and has amassed a small mountain of material online. He was initially reluctant to promote himself owing to the stigma of the singer-songwriter label among his peers.

“Back then people thought a singer-songwriter was Jack Johnson or John Mayer,” Mendez laughs. He’d grown up playing in punk bands and was reluctant to tell people he also wrote solo material. “I just felt like I didn't really like I had a place,” he says looking back. “I never thought I was going to be successful because it just wasn't being heralded at all.”

Read more from the original article on here at www.thefader.com.

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