Spaghetti Eastern Music, the solo venture of genre-fluid NYC/Hudson Valley guitarist Sal Cataldi has released “I Believe in Love,” a stripped-down, all-acoustic ballad previewing the spare narrative style of his forthcoming song-centric EP, Turpentine Valentines.
With “I Believe in Love,” Cataldi serves up his hard-earned take on romance: the pain it can cause and the beauty too… if one is willing to throw his/her heart back into the ring for another go-round after heartbreak. Two crystalline acoustic guitars and a solitary voice carry the tune whose narrative arc is reflected in the below, the first and concluding verses of the song:
I believe in love but not everlasting love
“I Believe in Love”
Life has shown me, it’s just a temporary disease
Attacks the heart, breaks it in two and does something funny to your knees
But I believe in love…
I believe in love but not everlasting love
If you can accept these terms, maybe we can get the disease
Warms the heart and make its whole
At least that’s what life has shown me so
I believe in love
The song comes with a counterpart video featuring some of the great screen kisses from the classic film era, seen below. It was recorded and engineered by Cataldi at his studios in Woodstock and a floating studio aboard his Houseboat Garlic Knot in Port Washington.
Critics from The New York Times, Time Out New York and Huffington Post have praised Cataldi’s debut album under the Spaghetti Eastern Music moniker, Sketches of Spam. This 16-track, 69-minute surf through a slew of contrasting moods, with largely guitar-driven instrumentals inspired by the acid funk of 70’s Miles, Krautrock, Ennio Morricone’s Spaghetti Western movie soundtracks as well as Fripp & Eno ambience and the sound of ECM guitar god Terje Rypdal.
These contrasted bare-bones acoustic vocal songs are reflective of the influence of John Martyn and Nick Drake, the mode showcased on his latest single. The discs’ acoustic titles included originals like “Wild One” and “Mama Called,” an instrumental cover of the Zappa rarity “Sleep Dirt” and a DADGAD-tuned, ballad paced reinvention of the Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride.”
I have never understood the desire to shove musicians into tiny boxes, the belief that you only get to be and play in one genre. I love all sorts of styles – straight-ahead and avant jazz, post-rock, prog, metal and funk, world music, electronic experimentation and, yes, quiet acoustic ballads like my new single, something that is definitely a 360-turn from my recent releases.
I love it all equally, listen to it all and want to perform it all – and that’s what I do with Spaghetti Eastern Music, at gigs and on recordings. That might make it hard for the algorithms that govern everything in the music world these days, so I guess my genre is best stated as iPod Shuffle.
Sal Cataldi – Spaghetti Eastern Music
The new single is available as of June 7 as a digital download via Spaghetti Eastern Music’s Bandcamp site, iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, CD Baby and other online stores.
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