Bronson Arroyo pitched for 17 seasons in the major leagues. Over the course of his career, he racked up 148 regular-season victories, earned a World Series ring with the 2004 Boston Red Sox, and secured himself a place in the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame. 

But a baseball wasn’t the only thing Arroyo was gripping during his time as a professional ballplayer. Whenever he had a spare moment off the field, you could usually find him playing guitar. “Someone gave me my first acoustic guitar when I was in the minors,” he recalls. “Even though I come from a musical family, playing music had never been my thing. But as soon as I strummed it a little bit, it was purely addicting. The guitar just grabbed me in a way that nothing else in life had ever grabbed me, other than trying to compete on a baseball field.”

For the better part of the last two decades, Arroyo has regularly performed around the country, usually playing sets of cover songs to raise funds for philanthropic causes like The Foundation to Be Named Later and United Sound. In 2005, he released Covering the Bases, a well-received album featuring his renditions of classic 90s anthems by the likes of Pearl Jam, Foo Fighters and Stone Temple Pilots. And now, five years after his retirement from baseball, Arroyo shares his own music with the world for the first time.

The album titled, Some Might Say features ten songs filled with hard-driving guitars, powerful choruses and vivid, observational lyrics sung by Arroyo with the same passion and intensity that he once applied to the delivery of a two-strike curveball. Recorded primarily in Los Angeles with guitarist Jamie Arentzen ( Miley Cyrus, American Hi-Fi, Butch Walker), bassist/keyboardist Ed Valauskas (Juliana Hatfield, The Gravel Pit, Graham Parker), guitarist/keyboardist Clint Walsh (Dwarves, The Motels, Pluralone), and drummer Eric Gardner (Gnarls Barkley, Tom Morello, Garbage). Legendary Cars keyboardist Greg Hawkes makes an appearance on the track, “Side FX.”. 

“Every song on the album has a very specific story to it,” Arroyo explains, “but the undertone throughout the whole record is my optimism for life. For me, the glass is always half full, and I’ve always been about being in the present tense and enjoying the moment now, because we’re all gonna die someday. That’s the thread that ties the whole album together, even if I’m singing about something that might have happened to someone else.”

“Higher Ground,” a song that he and Arentzen began working on when Arroyo was still in the majors, perfectly sums up his ethos. “That one is about not being so harsh on yourself and always thinking that you’re a failure, when you could be looking and seeing how much you’ve accomplished in your life, and how beautiful things have been for you in a lot of ways,” he says. “That’s always been easy for me, because my father instilled so much positivity and optimism in me when I was growing up. So I just took that into my baseball career, not knowing that someone like a Michael Jackson or a Brad Pitt or an Elvis Presley or even, you know, a president of the United States could live with so much insecurity, because I didn't see that in my household. But I realized early on that it was important to try to impart that to other people.”

“Nights Alive,” another uplifting track, comes more from Arroyo’s imagination — a little California-dreamin’ fantasy of romance in a simpler time. “That’s me thinking about what it would have been like riding down Sunset Boulevard in 1975, in a drop-top car with a girl I’ve got a crush on. It’s an absolutely perfect night, the moon is out, we can see the stars and we don’t have a care in the world. It’s like, what does that feel like to want to be with this person and feel like the whole universe is just dialed in for us tonight?”

“Guerrilla Warfare,” on the other hand, comes from the profound personal experience of visiting his father’s old neighborhood in Havana, Cuba. “That’s probably my favorite tune on the record,” he says. “My father told me that the only thing he could remember from being a young kid in Cuba was an area called Jesús del Monte, so I asked our tour guide to take us there. We went to the old church there, and the clerk was able to find my father and cousin’s baptism records, which had the addresses where my family lived. So that song is about me connecting with my roots, and also the history of the Cuban revolution, with Castro and Ché fighting in the Sierra Maestra Mountains. That kind of energy and aggression is part of the Arroyo gene, and part of my DNA.”

Though he doesn’t appear on the album, Arroyo credits his friend Eddie Vedder with playing an important role in the record’s creation. “I was in Seattle in 2019 to see the Reds play the Mariners,” he remembers, “and when Eddie picked me up in his car, I said, ‘I want to play you these demos I’ve been working on.’ He was like, ‘Okay, I think I have enough time for that…’ and I wound up playing him like fourteen songs, some of which were still really raw; but he went through every one, critiquing them and putting little notes down on my lyric sheets. And afterwards, he was like, ‘Hey, man — you got something here!’”
 “When I told Clint about it, he was like, ‘You’re insane. He’s like your musical hero; how could you even remotely think about doing that?’ But I don’t have those same insecurities that a lot of musicians do; if I have something and think it sounds pretty good, I’m like, “Hey, why don’t you take a listen?’ I mean, I grew up thinking I was gonna be Ozzie Smith, and Eddie’s like my Ozzie Smith, musically. So to have that person say, ‘Hey, that is pretty good, go get it and see what happens!’ — that was all the encouragement I needed!”

BRONSON ARROYO & THE ‘04