But the experience taught him the important lesson that even tiny musical snippets can be fleshed out into something more substantial. Cordero came honestly by the exhaustion and dreariness that radiates from the song: He was feeling sick when he wrote it, so sick in fact that he started off the write with just fragments of a verse. 'I wrote that back when we were quarantining in 2020, and I had just caught COVID,' he remembers.

It was pretty close.'Ĭulled from a variety of different writes, project outtakes and life phases over the past few years, the tracks on Songs to Keep You Warm all represent different aspects of the chill of winter, from the visual-driven 'Mountain Song' to songs like 'If We Said Goodbye,' which Cordero says contains more personal memories of weariness and melancholy. 'And I sent Bruce more than, there were maybe two extras.

Once he came up with the vision, the songs that would be right for the project immediately floated to the top of his mind. I don't think they should be cast away, you know?' Cordero notes, speaking about his decision to salvage songs that he'd written for other projects, but never wound up putting out. 'I remember learning long division in elementary school, and it's like, you have remainders sometimes. So when he got the idea to create a collection, he started assembling tracks - some he'd written earlier, some outtakes of other projects, some new - and sent them over to Robinson. 'I freaking love the way that studio sounds. So much so that it wound up being one of the first and most essential pieces of the Songs to Keep You Warm puzzle - 'Mountain Song' is one of the EP's leading tracks, but maybe even more importantly, recording it with Robinson at the helm established a sound that Cordero and the band would continue to chase throughout the record-making process. 'I didn't think anything of it until we got into the studio one day with Bruce, and the recording came out magic,' Cordero explains.

That was 'Mountain Song,' a co-write of Cordero's that dates back to a 2017 tour jaunt through the Pacific Northwest, which he liked at the time, but didn't immediately plan to record.

Down to the honkytonk download