Los Angeles Roots Rock Artist David Serby Releases Poetic New Single Flight Path

Los Angeles roots rock artist. David Serby has released his new single “Flight Path” today, a brooding, poetic piece of country songwriting that finds melancholy in the mundane and poetry in the unbearable.

The track is lifted from his forthcoming album Broken Heart in a Honky Tonk, due May 29.

“Flight Path” arrives with the kind of misery that feels almost comfortable – the sort Dave Alvin perfected on “Abilene” or Steve Earle nailed with “Feel Alright.”

The lyrics are heavy, but the music refuses to lie down with them. Drums and guitar strumming gallop beneath the weight of the words, while a striking pedal steel circles the song like a plane waiting for clearance to land. It is a contrast that is entirely deliberate.

David Serby was born in North Hollywood and now lives in Long Beach, directly beneath the landing path for the city’s airport. That geography handed him the song’s central metaphor – a volatile relationship in which the chaos outside the window bleeds into the chaos within.

“Living under this flight path gave me the idea of this volatile relationship,” says Serby. “I don’t know if it’s physical violence, but there’s so much yelling and pounding that the walls literally feel like they’re shaking. It’s so unsettling that they’re asking themselves, ‘Are we really unhappy, or is it the plane? What’s making us unhappy? Are the planes shaking this house, or are the walls shaking because we’re so miserable?’ The song flies into these problems, then dreams about flying out of them.”

It is a brilliant conceit – environmental noise as emotional cover, external turbulence masking the internal kind.

The protagonist of “Flight Path” is grinding out a living at a car wash, shining other people’s lives while his own refuses to come clean. By the song’s end, he is standing outside in soggy shoes, staring up at planes glinting with glass and chrome, slowly arriving at the realisation that this place – this relationship, this life – was never really his home.

Serby’s time studying film at Loyola Marymount University, perched near LAX, feeds directly into the song’s imagery. He has spoken about watching the sky catch fire at dusk over the airport, the pollution from jet fuel turning sunsets into something almost hallucinatory.

“I remember the most amazing sunsets,” he says. “Somebody told me that pollution creates these amazing sunsets as the sun blazes through all that jet fuel. In the second verse, the jets are shaking the walls. Everything feels super fragile and like it’s about to break. These planes are creating a confusing diversion outside of the window, trying to fool them with dazzling optics – like a magic spell – to paint away the problems happening in that apartment.”

That tension between dazzle and despair runs through everything David Serby does.

Broken Heart in a Honky Tonk opens with a run of high-energy shuffles before pulling back into more introspective terrain, eventually closing out in barroom honky tonk played with a wink and a laugh.

It is an album shaped by the Bakersfield sound – Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Dwight Yoakam – refracted through a modern Los Angeles lens. Serby is not interested in nostalgia for its own sake.

He is interested in real people, singing about real problems they have mostly brought on themselves.

Glide Magazine summed it up well, describing the album as “carefully curated” and noting that David Serby “takes a hard yet necessary look at life, attempting to find the line between solvable issues and the problems our minds can create for ourselves.”

Italian music magazine Buscadero, covering the album in its May 2026 print issue, called it the work of “a craftsman not interested in a happy ending.”

The record was produced by Serby’s long-time collaborator Edward Tree, a guitarist who has spent time with The Spencer Davis Group and who has served as Serby’s musical right hand for more than two decades. The supporting cast is formidable.

Drummer Kevin Jarvis has worked with Bo Diddley, Lucinda Williams, Brian Wilson, and the Jayhawks’ Mark Olson. Bassist David J. Carpenter has played alongside John Doe of X and Roger Hodgson of Supertramp.

Pedal steel guitarist Chris Lawrence brings credits with Mike Ness and Shooter Jennings, and keyboardist Carl Byron leads the Hot Club of Los Angeles.

Vocal support comes from Darice Bailey and Grammy-nominated blues singer Teresa James. Special guest Jay Dee Maness – whose career stretches back to the Byrds’ landmark 1968 album Sweetheart of the Rodeo – appears on album track “Little Ol’ Bruise.”

David Serby is no newcomer to big stages. He has played Stagecoach Music Festival twice, sharing bills with Lucinda Williams, Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, Kris Kristofferson, Neko Case, Wanda Jackson, Leon Russell, and many more.

“Flight Path” is out now across all major streaming platforms. Broken Heart in a Honky Tonk follows on May 29.