As a kid growing up in Northern California, Rome Ramirez taught himself to play guitar in his family’s garage and soon began penning songs with a warm and potent honesty. By the time he’d reached his late teens, he’d moved to Los Angeles and quickly landed his dream job: serving as frontman for a revived iteration of iconic ska-punk act Sublime, his all-time favorite band. Since co-founding Sublime with Rome in 2009, Ramirez has released three albums with the trio and toured with the likes of Cypress Hill and Incubus, all while continuing to craft his own deeply confessional songs. For the latest turn in a career that’s also included lending his songwriting talents to tracks from superstars like Selena Gomez and Enrique Iglesias, the Nashville-based artist is now gearing up to make his solo debut with a body of work spotlighting his soul-soothing voice and straight-from-the-heart storytelling like never before.

Arriving on the heels of 2023’s Cactus Cool — the debut EP from Rome & Duddy, his collaboration with Duddy Bushnell of Dirty Heads — Ramirez’s first round of solo material embodies a rootsy simplicity informed by his recent relocation to Nashville. “Once I broke out of the L.A. routine, I found myself getting back to just strumming songs on an acoustic guitar and taking a more organic approach to the music,” he recalls. Graced with elements of folk and soul and timeless pop, the result is a stripped-back yet spellbinding sound with an undeniable power to ease the mind and lift the spirit. Meanwhile, Ramirez’s lyrics hit a rare balance of personal revelation and heartfelt positivity, often providing much-needed hope in chaotic times.

A prime introduction to Ramirez’s solo work, the bright and breezy “Ain’t Too Late” delivers a poignant message of perseverance, wrapping up its words of wisdom in the kind of captivating melodies that immediately imprint on your heart. “It’s a song reminding people that it’s never too late to change, or to fix the things in your life that you want to be fixed,” he says. “I wrote it thinking about how being relentless with your passion really can take you far, which in a way is the beacon of this whole project for me.” Another ode to embracing life’s wild complexity, “The Hard Way” unfolds in stomping rhythms, lush banjo riffs, and soaring piano work as Ramirez speaks to the struggles in his past and the promise of the future. “I wrote that song over ten years ago, but it still holds true to who I am today,” he says. “It’s about not being afraid to keep growing and keep evolving—and even if you learn things the hard way, you’ve got to get up and try again.”

Although its perspective is indelibly shaped by his experience as a father of three young children, Ramirez’s solo output also sustains the raw sincerity he first brought to his songwriting as a teenager. “I started writing as a way to deal with my dad splitting on us and having a girl tear my heart into pieces,” he reveals. “It was like pulling the cork out of a bottle — so many songs came from all that.” After trading his father’s abandoned Volkswagen Beetle for a laptop supplied by a friend from school, he immersed himself in music production and slowly began amassing a sizable bank of songs. “During the pandemic I went back and looked through all these songs from different stages of my life, and it was like cracking open a treasure chest of memories,” he says. “After a while I started recording everything in my home studio, and it all just snowballed from there.”

As he gears up to share his solo work with the world, Ramirez hopes that his songs might leave listeners with the same joy and solace he finds in creating music. “Especially during lockdown, the feeling of connection I got from playing songs for people on live streams gave me a whole new sense of purpose,” he says. “With the music I’m putting out now, one of the main goals is to build a community of people who want to lift each other up and really celebrate the moment. Life’s been so good to me, so now I want to pay it forward and bring that energy to everybody else.”