Blunders by Ross Goldstein

Co-produced by weirdo punk luminary Wreckless Eric at Eric’s home studio in Catskill, NY, Ross Goldstein’s fifth full-length record Blunders is simultaneously laden with psychedelia and overflowing with a kind of poignant realism. On Blunders, Goldstein’s songwriting is as vivid as the lead guitars are fuzzy. And altogether, the listener is left with a sense of Goldstein as weary but witty, a kind of psychedelic poet of lonely, rainy highways sending melancholic postcards from the edges of dreamtime.

From 2020 to 2023, Goldstein was, as he puts it, entirely on his own. He fell out of touch with friends, fell into the depths of depression and isolation and ended up living out of a suitcase, bouncing from cheap hotel to cheap hotel. This crisis came to a dramatic and personal climax before Goldstein emerged into the open and welcoming arms of a series of recording sessions marked by Wreckless Eric’s engineering and companionship.

Blunders is therefore defined by a compelling dualism. There is on the one hand a potent sense of isolation: dreary views through rainy windows, reflections on failed relationships and scenes of harrowing loneliness. But just as prominently, there is warmth and humor, there are dense and shimmering layers of mellotron and guitar, a subtle but infectious pulse and gleeful explosions of harmony, all of which may call to mind The Beach Boys’ unsung masterpiece Holland or Neil Young’s On the Beach or contemporaries like Chris Cohen and Hand Habits.

Bolstered by Wreckless Eric’s deft co-production, Goldstein creates scenes lucid and wistful, as on “Foggy Blues,” when he sings: “Driving down Montauk highway / Early afternoon / By the time the sun went down / We were sleeping in the dunes.” There’s something in the timbre of Goldstein’s placid and crystalline voice that furthers the sense of duality. We can hear somehow that, as he sings, he’s no longer adrift, that he is steadied and at peace while the songs’ characters drift and dream and sleep in the sand, “pull over now and then for a coffee” and change “faces” and “names” like fugitives on the run from identity, from ghosts of personal decisions. There are echoes of Dennis Wilson’s Pacific Ocean Blue but Blunders is too personal to be derivative. Instrumental “The Village” is a simple but gorgeous ode to Catskill, NY, while the penultimate track, “The Swimmer” epitomizes this distance-from-the-sadness
quality. While it seems like the song could be detailing some somber scenes from Goldstein’s life (“Nobody answers as I keep knocking on the door / I am swimming in my tears as the credits roll / Nobody home”) it is in fact inspired by the Burt Lancaster film of the same name.

After 53 years out East –– some of those spent in the melancholic eddy that preceded the Blunders sessions –– Goldstein has relocated to southern New Mexico where he lives and works on the top floor of an old art deco hotel built in 1938. It’s a poignant image, a kind of layered and poetic resolution. An era of listless wandering from cheap motel to cheap motel has come to an end in an old but beautifully restored desert hotel. Goldstein puts it simply: “I find the atmosphere and vibes inspiring and have been working on new projects.” One can imagine the painted front of the postcard: Greetings from the edge of dreamtime.