Eli Goldberg needed a breather. This is, to some extent, how it goes every time he completes a new album under his Ann Annie moniker — diving deep into the ether for a new sound, finding it, then walking away for a while to dream up the next destination. But the exacting process necessary to craft the dense, orchestrated layers of 2024’s The Wind in the solitude of his bedroom had left him drained. He began thinking of quieter, more intimate sounds, and found himself writing material that combined some of his interests from the very beginning of Ann Annie with more recent interests. It resulted in El Prado, an album of wide open spaces in which Goldberg’s past and future freely mingle. El Prado is the latest in a prolific streak comprising six albums since 2018, tracing Goldberg’s arc from a nascent musician in his late teens to the self-assured, adventurous artist he’s become now in his mid-twenties. In the beginning, he was drawn to ambient music for his own solace, making long tracks he’d use to meditate to, or that he’d listen to while walking through the woods. The music provided him an outlet to figure out who he was as a person, and in turn, Ann Annie has often gently shape-shifted according to new interests — sometimes being more synth-oriented, sometimes drawing upon Goldberg’s lifelong love of classical music, sometimes going folkier. For El Prado, Goldberg was drawn to ambient country and the dronier side of the ambient genre overall. Each stylistic pivot in Ann Annie can be tied to Goldberg’s current musical interests, but also to his environment and embracing limitations. Before El Prado, he moved to a new apartment on a busy street in Portland. Outside, cars rushed by throughout the day, sounding like waves — almost compelling him to name the album The Ocean, these sounds still remain in the backdrop of some El Prado tracks. On the other hand, he was living in an apartment with thin walls and three roommates he tried not to disturb. “I became much more aware of sound,” he explains. “I was trying to be quieter in general.” He began anchoring compositions with hushed, reflective acoustic guitar or Wurlitzer keys, all with an eye to make something more organic and simpler. These compositions have a fraction of the tracks Goldberg might’ve included on past recordings, but they are still immersive — he’s just learned to let small, patient pieces speak more resoundingly. The breakthrough that opened the door for El Prado arrived in the winter of early 2025, when Goldberg wrote “Reprise.” Eventually destined to become the album’s opener, “Reprise” was an intentional echo of past ideas and memories, drawn from both Goldberg’s own work and artists he admires, particularly Claude Debussy and Erik Satie. Flipping through his own history also led to recording it in the style of one of his earliest albums, 2019’s Wander Into. This triggered a two-week recording spurt, in which Goldberg used his old tape recording techniques to carve out a new sound, blending different eras of Ann Annie. Along with early versions of “The Meadow” and “The Field,” “Reprise” became the skeleton key — opening up the world of El Prado spiritually and aesthetically. Like much of Goldberg’s work, El Prado is inspired by and trying to conjure the feeling of being in nature, having peaceful spaces in which to reflect. “The Meadow” and “The Field” led him to “El Prado,” Spanish for meadow or field. Goldberg was adopted from the Philippines, and it also happened to be the case that “Prado” was his biological last name. It felt like a cosmic convergence once he learned the meaning of the word. The album was, in a way, accidentally self-titled. “It fit because the theme of the album is going back to when I did more open, slower, abstract songs,” Goldberg says. It almost draws a line, back-tracking but also setting a path forward, with a name bearing multiple meanings for where Goldberg came from and who he became. From “El Prado” and “Reprise” onward, individual songs attempted to capture different landscapes. “Laurel” is unhurried guitar perforated by sun-dapple synth sounds. The strings and “slightly out of tune” Wurlitzer of “The Ocean” were inspired by drives along the Pacific Northwest coast during cold, foggy months. The collection of pseudo-title-tracks return to the same places trying to see new angles: In “The Field,” it’s looking out over an expanse cloaked by night, and in “El Prado” a rippling banjo welcomes the sunrise. After painstakingly playing every note on The Wind himself, Goldberg welcomed a few collaborators into the fold this time. Bryn Bliska adds aqueous synth textures to “Slow River.” And for “The Meadow,” Goldberg teamed with an artist he’s admired for a decade: Frankie Cosmos’ Greta Kline. He sent Kline a draft of the song, and Kline returned it with a full vocal and lyric. “‘The Meadow’ lyrics are about looking inward and noticing changes over time, feeling warm and cold, distance and closeness,” Kline says. “I was kind of just freestyling when I was writing the melody, and it came together into this sort of wistful story of a relationship — from sharing a stage, to sharing a kitchen, to feeling distance in the great outdoors.” Though Goldberg and Kline had never discussed the lyrics, he was shocked to find how closely they resonated with his own experience that had led into El Prado. Arriving more fully into adulthood, Goldberg felt some of his relationships changing — some decaying, some deepening. He even felt a new relationship with himself and how he perceived his Ann Annie alter ego. “I’ve been thinking about what it means to be an artist, what it means to be Ann Annie,” Goldberg says. “It’s partly why I wanted to strip the sound back — to be more exploratory, less heady, just create and not question what it means or connects to.” As Ann Annie travels across El Prado, some doors close and some new possibilities emerge. Goldberg felt content with what he’d achieved with certain techniques, and then began cooking up whole other sounds for where he’d go next. All of it, as always, orients towards parsing who he is and what he’s perceiving in the world. “I know what makes sense for me to make, what makes sense from a feeling, in the moment, in the now,” Goldberg concludes. “At this point in my life, I’m asking what I can do with all those things I’ve learned.”