Jerry David DeCicca - Cardiac Country LP (Sophomore Lounge, 2025)

"Dear Listener,

I wrote and recorded Cardiac Country, my 6th solo album, just a few months before I received a diagnosis that led to open heart surgery at the Cleveland Clinic to replace my leaky aortic valve. At the time, I thought I was in the best shape of my life. Only the last song, “Old Hat,” was written and recorded with the knowledge of my health issue. I tracked it, solo acoustic, two weeks before my operation, just in case… You can hear me running out of air.

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.

In the opener, “Long Distance Runner,” inspired by Haruki Murakami with a nod to the Grateful Dead’s “Fire on the Mountain,” I sing “Your heart remains healthy/ for what lies ahead” in the final verse. I hear it not as ironic, but more as an affirmation that I was going to be ok. Other songs, like “Unlit Road” and “My Friend” I sound, quite literally, heart-broken from losing two close friends, one to alcohol and the other to a misunderstanding that snowballed into disrepair. “Mourning Locket” imagines my own hair in the antiquated jewelry, kept by my loved one as a souvenir after I pass. “Good Ghosts,” my favorite song on the album, sits me down on my couch, getting drunk, while listening to records by dead musicians, soaking in their wisdom and heartache, side after side, until bedtime. “Frozen Hearts” is a breezy, Tom T. Hall-ish morality song about the emptiness of virtue signaling and “Where Did My Empathy Go?” chugs through some self-hating, animal-loving vignettes, rhetorically asking myself why I eat meat. “Dripping Man” is about crying all the time (which is why there’s a tuba solo), something I’ve increased in recent years and have now taken to a whole new level. In the months preceding my surgery, I would burst into tears at the grocery, the dentist, the post office, wherever and whenever someone asked me how I was doing. I still cry almost daily, which seems to be “normal” according to other members of my Aortic Valve Facebook support group. Then, there’s… “Knives”… yikes!

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.

I wrote these songs in my living room in Bulverde, Texas in a short quick burst over a couple weeks, wondering at the time what bound them together, while listening to a lot of Don Williams, Lee Dorsey, and Bruce Cockburn with no idea that blood regurgitated down the side of my heart. Being in my late 40’s and in good shape, I didn’t have any obvious symptoms yet. When I first starting writing songs 35 years ago, mortality was one of my favorite subjects, so when I wrote my two-minute closer, “Old Hat,” fearing my heart surgery like I hope to fear nothing ever again, it was a literal tip of the hat to my old self: writing about death, once again, but with its nearness being a less abstract reality.

I cut this record, mostly live, in San Antonio, Texas with my friend, Joe Trevino, at Blue Cat Studios (Flaco Jimenez, Los Texmaniacs) where I worked before with Augie Meyers and Will Beeley. I thought BJ Cole, the pedal steel legend who played with Scott Walker and John Cale, still visited San Antonio yearly, but alas Covid ended that tradition for him, so he self-recorded his parts at his home in London.

The year immediately following the recording of this album was the worst I’ve known. I’ve never been so scared before, and my father passing soon after my surgery didn’t help. I celebrated my first valve-versary (that’s what us Heart Warriors like to call it) by touring Europe with Bill Callahan and Jim White in September 2024. It helped my mood and confidence greatly. I’ve even almost started enjoying the ticking sound of my internal metronome (AKA my On-X mechanical valve). I am different in many ways now, but I can’t figure out how to describe it just yet. Maybe my next record will tell me." - JDD, January 2025