Pueblo

For the last three years across the western U.S., Berkley has been getting attention every time he reappears online with new music. An early version of his first single, "Pueblo Nights," earned a comparison to Beck from the Dallas Observer in 2020. Later that year, "Oldies," featuring Margo Price and Orville Peck sideman Luke Schneider, found a

For the last three years across the western U.S., Berkley has been getting attention every time he reappears online with new music. An early version of his first single, "Pueblo Nights," earned a comparison to Beck from the Dallas Observer in 2020. Later that year, "Oldies," featuring Margo Price and Orville Peck sideman Luke Schneider, found a place as one of the Top 100 songs of 2020 from Dallas music blog Central Track. "Fiesta Day" landed Berkley in the pantheon of Colorado musicians a year later following a deep interview with the regional music archive Elk Bugles. Finally, the feather in Berkley's cap came way of a Bandcamp New and Notable mention in 2022 for his EP Love Notes, cementing his sound as "earnest and immediate pop-rock [...] with shades of Americana and ’70s Laurel Canyon rock & roll."

Now the full vision of the small world Berkley has built with his singles: Pueblo. His full-length debut finds the songwriter expanding personal flashbacks of his youth growing up in Pueblo, Colorado into 10 tracks of gauzy, straight-ahead reflections on how one creates the myths of their life and whether they are worth living or erasing.

Pueblo offers an introduction not just to Berkley's songcraft, but to the person behind the guitar. In an interview from 2021, he explained, "When I started writing songs for my first full length [...], I wanted them to be about how Pueblo affected me or shaped who I came to be now that I'm not living there. It's like a memory of an old friend or a relationship that's ended. As much as you'd like to either relive or forget it, you're stuck with the memory. I realized I was writing about trauma."

The more universal themes that came from that exploration of trauma — healing and forgiveness — revealed that Berkley couldn't write about his hometown without writing about himself and his relationships. Losing friends, lovers, feeling self-conscious as a kid, demanding but fearing a larger existence: that's not just Pueblo. That's life.

Available on digital, CD, and random-colored vinyl, each format tells a different story of the Pueblo that everyone has lived in as they come to terms with who they really are. The digital album presents the songs as individual impressionist snapshots. The CD adds depth with a lyric sheet and exclusive photos and art. The LP offers the full picture with brown, army green (for Berkley's childhood infatuation with G.I. Joe), gray, and purple vinyl; lyrics and credits on a full-size insert featuring work from Pueblo photographers; and exclusive liner notes from International Latino Book Award-winning poet, Juan J. Morales.

The LP also includes exclusive audio from vintage local Pueblo radio station KDZA broadcasts and field recordings direct from Pueblo captured in locales significant to Berkley's life. This makes for a seamless listening experience track to track, side per side. This is how Pueblo is meant to be heard.