Mando Saenz titled his first album in eight years All My Shame. But the veteran Nashville songwriter who’s had his songs recorded by Miranda Lambert, Midland, and Lee Ann Womack has nothing to regret. Despite the heaviness of the record’s title, Saenz isn’t repenting for past sins. Instead, he’s celebrating the empowerment that comes with finally knowing oneself.
“You might think it’s a shameful thing, but it’s about being yourself and knowing your flaws,” Saenz says. “Sometimes you just got to put it out there and not consider them flaws — it’s just who you are.”
Saenz, a native of Corpus Christi, Texas, cut his teeth in the Houston clubs before moving to Nashville. For All My Shame, he worked with producer Ken Coomer (Wilco), who helped him tap into dream-pop sounds and vibes on the album. There are elements of both Big Star and Radiohead in tracks like “In All My Shame” and “Talk Is Cheap.”
“I knew I had those influences just because I loved all different kinds of music over the years, including those two bands, but I didn’t realize how much infused into my writing until Ken’s production brought it out,” Saenz says. “It was good to let these songs breathe in that direction.”
While he has a hand in writing radio hits for Music Row, Saenz identifies more with Nashville’s potent indie scene. In his words, he’s a loner. “I’ve always been kind of an oddball,” he says. “When it comes to the industry part, I’ve kind of consciously put blinders on. I really don’t want to know what goes on behind the curtain. I don’t even listen to a lot of country radio.”
It’s surprising then to hear him describe All My Shame as “the most Nashville record I’ve ever made.”
“I say that because they’re mostly co-writes on this record. I’ve always written for myself, even if the song happens to get cut [by someone else]. But this was all written pretty much on Music Row with a lot of writers I’d never even met before,” he says. “But we were just trying to write songs; we’re not really chasing tails.”
But Saenz did chase, and successfully catch, something from his childhood for the album. At Coomer’s suggestion, he recorded a cover of “Rainbow in the Dark,” by Dio — Saenz’s first concert experience as a kid.
On paper, a Texas-born quasi-country singer covering a 1983 heavy-metal standard reads like a trainwreck. But by stripping down the song to just a guitar and Saenz’s haunting voice, “Rainbow in the Dark” emerges as a devastating folk ballad. Saenz has described his version as one in line with a Townes Van Zandt performance.
“It was pretty much kismet because that was my first concert ever. I was in the fifth grade,” Saenz says of cutting “Rainbow in the Dark.” “I just knew that that’s a song I had to make special — I have too many metal friends.”
He needn’t have worried. Even the late Ronnie James Dio would have given Saenz’s cover the metal-horns salute. “I was happy to see a lot of people I really trusted [liked it],” he says. “That was a big relief.”
NEWS
No matter what you thought of the Kendrick Lamar and Drake battle, there was only one undisputed winner by the end of it all: the reaction community in the worlds of streaming and YouTube. Your favorite content creators broke down the bars, reacted to all the most shocking moments, and helped this showdown become one of hip-hop's most culturally significant and resonant moments in a long time... For better or worse. See, the battle's technically not over yet, but only because the 6ix God's idea of victory is clearly quite different. In his federal defamation lawsuit against Universal Music Group – his label – for releasing K.Dot's "Not Like Us," he named various content creators who allegedly helped boost the track's widespread popularity and, as a result, its supposedly defamatory nature.
Furthermore, the specific allegation that Drake brings up in this highly controversial lawsuit is that UMG "whitelisted" copyright claims for YouTubers, streamers, etc. concerning "Not Like Us." This means that they would be able to monetize their content without facing a copyright claim from UMG over "Not Like Us," and this isn't really an allegation because various creators have backed this up. But a few important (alleged) caveats that people are talking about online need to be clear. First, "whitelisting" supposedly happens on behalf of a record label behind a song like the West Coast banger, and UMG is instead the distributor of that track. Secondly, as rapper and online personality ScruFaceJean brings up as seen in the post below, tracks like "Push Ups" were also "whitelisted" by its team.
Along with Jean, many other of your favorite content creators spoke out against this Drake lawsuit. Zias! and B.Lou, for example, spoke with their lawyer about the possibility of countersuing for emotional distress, as they found the Toronto superstar's accusations and his implication of them very disturbing and misguided. NoLifeShaq also dragged The Boy through the mud, calling him "soft" and positing that, whether "whitelisting" happened or not, they would react to "Not Like Us" accordingly as they did to his own tracks.
In addition, it's important to bring up that many others fans have pointed to how Drake excitedly used streamers to generate hype and reaction clips for his own diss tracks against Kendrick Lamar. The most direct example is with Kai Cenat, whom he texted to "stay on stream" before dropping "Family Matters." Ironically, the Twitch giant appears in this clowned-upon defamation lawsuit as an example of what the OVO mogul's accusations and implications are. And one more thing: there is no direct link between monetization and algorithmic boosting on sites like YouTube. With all this in mind, content creators seem to feel almost insulted at the idea that they only reacted to the two biggest rappers in the world beefing with each other because one of them would allow them to make money. If Drizzy knew the first thing about the reaction community, maybe he wouldn't have included this...
