Former House of Pain lead rapper Everlast successfully reinvented himself as a rugged bles/rap/acoustic rock songwriter after suffering a heart attack at the tail end of the 1990s that required him to no longer Jump Around. While the quality of his recording outpus has been steadily declining since Whitey Ford Sings The Blues (his second-overall solo record but first post-House of Pain), he does have good songs on each subsequent release, and his second and third "Whitey era" records (Eat At Whitey's and White Trash Beautiful) still spin regularly in my home, as does his cover of Johnny Cash's Folson Prison Blues.
He released Embers to Ashes yesterday, and the leadoff video is Mistaken Identity:
Let's not kid ourselves: if it wasn't Everlast, I probably wouldn't want to hear that song more than once, but with my favourable sentiment towards Erik Schrody, I don't mind it and might even enter it in a "Songs of 2026" playlist of sorts - though probably not a "Best of the 2020s" or my "Eternal Playlist", where dozens of his songs still play daily.
It's a typical ballad with themes of loss, yearning, learning and self-affirmation, with a little bit of hip-hop boasting thrown in for good measure, which is possibly where director Ryen McPherson found the inspiration to portray it as a Reservoir Dogs-esque bit of torture porn where Everlast first faces himself at his current age and the victim personae eventually turns into his younger self, played here by Yelawolf, the former Eminem protégé who produced the new record.
