Zach Phillips

Zach Phillips is a San Diego-based singer-songwriter whose music occupies the space between California roots-rock, folk, indie and the hazier edges of dream pop. His songs pair a classic songwriter’s sensibility with arrangements that can be equally intimate and expansive — acoustic guitars and mandolins giving way to organs, electric guitars and atmospheric textures.

His 2022 album, Goddaughters, follows 2020’s critically acclaimed The Wine of Youth. A cinematic roots-rock song cycle, Goddaughters draws as much from spectral dream pop as it does folk and indie. The album is an interior travelogue, mapping journeys of longing, seeking and, ultimately, redemption.

Across the record, hints of ’90s alternative on songs like “Worshipers” and “Harmony Grove” sit alongside the British-folk influence of “New Star” and the title track. The sounds are connected by a distinctly California roots-rock character: at turns mantra-like and jagged, dreamlike and soulful. Spaced-out guitars play alongside organs and mandolins; indie rock and indie country comfortably share the same ground.

At the center of it all is Phillips’ songwriting — concerned with place, memory, longing and what might be waiting just beyond them.