Sundown is the new album from Eddie Chacon, produced by John Carroll Kirby.

In October 2021, Eddie Chacon and John Carroll Kirby decamped to Ibiza for two weeks. There, they rented the island’s only Fender Rhodes from one of the local rave crews. John posted it against the plaster walls and concrete floors of their temporary home, which was set into a green hillside overlooking a beach called Siesta. Between sessions, they jumped into the water and ate at tiny mom-and-pop bars on the sand. “Away from the raves, it’s such a raw island,” says Eddie. “It’s a place where it’s best not to plan.”

The two artists had worked together on Eddie Chacon’s 2020 album, Pleasure, Joy and Happiness in Los Angeles, where they both live, but wrote the first half of Sundown during that Ibiza stay. The rest they finished at 64 Sound Studios in northeast Los Angeles. Joining Eddie on vocals and John on production and keys were Logan Hone (flutes and saxophones), Elizabeth Lea (trombone), Will Logan (drums), and David Leach (percussion). “It feels like we’re building our dream house,” says Eddie. “With Pleasure, Joy, and Happiness, we poured the foundation and now we’re expanding into new rooms.”

Meeting Kirby in 2019 was the catalyst for Chacon’s return to releasing music. Pleasure, Joy and Happiness was meant to be a swan song, bringing closure to a music career that began as a teenager playing in Bay Area garage bands and peaked in the 1990s when, as one half of the duo Charles & Eddie, he topped charts internationally with “Would I Lie To You”, before deserting the business. Eddie couldn’t imagine his new music would resonate not only with fans but fellow musicians.

“The music of Eddie Chacon – timeless, contemporary & unflinchingly honest – celebrates both the joy and pain of the human experience,” says Mark Speer of Khruangbin. “He is truly a legendary artist in our own time.” In fact, it was a fan who offered Eddie and John the chance to stay in his Ibiza home for as long as they liked. “Sundown is the follow-up I never thought I would get to make,” says Eddie. During its creation, Pharoah Sanders’ ‘Greeting to Saud’ was a daily listen. Instead of emulating its sound, he absorbed its deeper lesson, that simplicity wins out over virtuosity every time. Or, as Eddie puts it: “As I’ve gotten older, I have a wider brush and it takes me fewer brush strokes to cover an area.”

Sundown’s meditative lyrics bear out Eddie’s claim that only someone with his life experience could have written the record. ‘Comes and Goes’ deals with “the experience of waking up one day and realising that you’re someplace you never expected to be”; ‘Sundown’ reflects on “the brevity of life: losing loved ones and being humbled by how little time we have on this earth”, and ‘Step by Step’ is about “how a lot of what we experience is a mirror reflection of ourselves, finally realising that oftentimes we are the only person standing in our way.”

Eddie Chacon is 59 now. That timespan is a point of pride. His quietly confident music wouldn’t exist without it.