A singer-songwriter can fade into the background of a café even as they perform, their voice taking its place among the scrape of chairs and the hiss of the steam wand. Every so often, a line gets through and someone at the next table forgets what they were about to say. Alejandro Aranda of Pomona, California, who records here as Hondo, similarly learned to play for people who were free to keep walking. He was making a living washing dishes and working warehouse jobs when he took up guitar and piano around the age of twenty. After his shifts, he played in the street, in part to get past his stage fright. The guitar style he developed owed much to the piano and to the hours he spent with Bach and Chopin. With Philip Glass in his ear as well, he wondered how much of the keyboard’s capacity to carry a melody and keep a rhythm in motion he could fit onto six strings.
One of the first songs he’d written, “10 Years,” was for a friend going through a divorce. He posted it to YouTube in 2016 under the name Scarypoolparty, which came from a gathering for which a friend needed a name to put on a bill. The following year, an Instagram message to Twin Shadow led to a collaboration and a place on tour, though Aranda still played his own backyard shows on days off. After one of those shows in Hollywood, a scout for American Idol got in touch, and Aranda was willing to audition if he could sing his own songs. At his televised audition in March 2019, he sang “Out Loud” with his guitar, then moved to the piano for “Cholo Love.” He finished as runner-up, and by August the audition clip had drawn fourteen million views on YouTube. During a visit to Pomona before the finale, he began singing “Out Loud” and heard people singing the words back to him.
That November, Aranda’s debut album as Scarypoolparty, Exit Form, put both audition songs on the same record as the industrial rock of “Diamonds.” He worked with Rob Mathes and an eighteen-piece orchestra on 2021’s The Act of Forgiveness. Mathes arranged “Poison,” which Aranda revisited on Unplugged in 2024 alongside the songs that now make up the first volume of Sessions. Released November 6, 2026, that EP puts “Hondo version” next to each title, and its companion followed on November 13. In announcing the first set, Aranda said he had played the songs live in his room, in single takes. The voice that had traveled so far in the span of a video could now lead us back through several versions of the same song to the small distance between his hand and his mouth.
On “Out Loud,” his picking and finger tapping usher us into that interval with an unforced joy. He offers to become the person somebody needs, then finds himself reading the answer in their face, where the words have arrived ahead of the exhale that might have carried them. His plea for closeness bids the very light to testify, and in the curious phrase “broken hearts molded to proof,” the damage itself must take a shape that can be entered into evidence. When the refrain makes breathing and telling the truth equally difficult, the falsetto gives a single vowel more space than the speaker grants himself in the relationship. From that mid-tempo charm we move into “Fading Away,” where the gossamer sweetness of the flowing arpeggios leaves just enough of the sting exposed. By letting us hear a chord one note at a time, Aranda keeps a heart stretched to its limit from having to bear the whole weight of the harmony at once.
“Pieces” began as a figure he played to warm up his hands, already part of his daily practice by the time he added lyrics. He’s spoken of the satisfaction he still feels when he can sing it without losing his way through the guitar part. The bright, urban propulsion of the drum track gives that old exercise a street grid to cut across. A GPS will sometimes direct you to an address where you no longer live, and there’s a measure of sanity in taking a detour whose sole purpose is to put more city between you and that door. When the second volume opens with “Sunset,” the music flows so easily that a destination seems beside the point. The last light fits inside a glass on the table, and the gratitude in his phrasing has something of that disregard for scale.
A decade after that first YouTube posting, “10 Years” has caught up with its title. Anyone who’s lived with an earlier recording can be at the chorus in memory while the singer is still drawing his first. He has to get there the long way, through every moment we’ve already folded out of sight. Separation leaves a surplus of such time, hours that still expect to belong to someone, and the song’s delicacy takes on a darker tinge for giving them their full length. When the verses for what happened run out, the melody still keeps its appointment with the empty chair.
In “Poison,” there’s enough gorgeousness in the guitar to account for the time it takes to loosen one’s hold on what hurts. Some of the tenderness was real, and there will be days when it’s the only part of the story a person can remember. Perhaps the one sitting across from us meant to say yes, as they had for years, making its way as far as the back of their teeth. For two seconds it stays there, and a whole future goes by without acquiring a past.
