Greg Mendez often works alone. You can hear and feel that solitude in his music. Pull back the curtain on his latest album, Beauty Land, and it wouldn't be surprising to find Mendez in his West Philadelphia home, playing every instrument and wringing every ounce of emotion from his soft-spoken voice.

Lately, things have been looking up. After going into credit card debt to finance his breakthrough self-titled album, Mendez signed with Dead Oceans. For the first time in 15 years, he can focus entirely on making music. He still prefers to work alone, though. Today, we'll talk about making Beauty Land and take a closer look at his songwriting process.

This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Miguel Perez. Our senior producer is Kimberly Junod and our engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our line producer is Will Loftus.