Jeff Saenz of Baby Snakes & The Electric Co.‘s has experienced many different genres, growing up playing punk, and progressing to rock, alternative country, and Americana music. Through his love of music, he opened his Dallas studio, Modern Electric Sound Recorders, created it to feel like a home base, a meeting ground, and a creative engine for a North Texas scene that includes artists like Leon Bridges, Paul Cauthen, Joshua Ray Walker, and the Vandoliers.
Ten years after opening the studio, Saenz suffered a near-fatal accident that led to the amputation of both his hands on June 1st, 2021. The making of Ouroboros became one of his largest commitments in his life, aiming to prove to himself that he could still make music after such a tragedy.
After the accident, Saenz lost the ability to play the instruments he loved, guitar, bass, drums, and keys. After relentless persistence and the love and support from musician friends, his renewed love for singing, and playing piano with a rubber-tipped stylus, yielded much more than he could’ve anticipated.
For years, Jeff Saenz poured a producer’s energy into other artists. With Ouroboros, he turned that focus inward. Paying homage to 2025, one of the most challenging years for Saenz.
“2025 was finding the clearing after all of the smoke, only to find myself back in the fire,” says Saenz. “This album could not be sequenced any other way than chronologically. To do so would be to disgrace the process of that Year of the Snake. To disgrace the death, the rebirth, the letting go, the holding on, the end, and the beginning. The cycle… the renewal. Ouroboros is that story. It’s my story. It’s everyone’s story, in one way or another.”
The collection guides listeners through his story and the love he has for his wife and children.
The first track I want to talk about is “Dark Horse”, not to be confused with Katy Perry‘s “Dark Horse”. The track starts off softer, progressing to a heavier sound at around a minute in, and at the chorus “These roads are drenched / With the sweat of our hearts tonight / Ready for friction, desperate for kinetic light”. I love how instead of simply stating “ready for love, desperate for touch”, he used the words “friction” and “kinetic light”, showing that their chemistry is quite literally electric.
The next track I wanted to talk about is “Kintsugi”. Kintsugi is the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with urushi lacquer, dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. More often than not, when a pottery piece breaks, it is from a bad fall. And though pottery pieces take hours, if not days to complete, there is still hope for the broken piece with the art of Kintsugi.
Written in April 2025, Saenz had one intention: write about this artform as a metaphor for the rigors of love. He stated the track “is about fracture, breakage, and damage after recovering from the trauma of a lifetime. It’s a testament to resilience; it’s about diving the darkest depths of the ocean known to man to gather the broken shards and turn them into something so beautiful.”
In the track, Saenz speaks on what I believe is his relationship with his wife, “8 years all together, 4 and 4 or so / No love was ever lost / But when it fell, it broke”, like pottery, there was lots of time put into the relationship, and the love for it was never lost, but it changed, and needed to be made anew.
“Mix the glue in with gold dust/We won′t hide these scars/We’ll piece this back together/We′re a work of art”
The track uses words and phrases like “beauty”, “resilience”, “scars”, and “I won’t break” to mimic Kintsugi’s results and Saenz’s relationship with his wife. Though they were in a rough space, Saenz tries to save it, explaining they just have to “mend the broken hearts between us”. I think my favorite lyric has to be “a beauty, a resilience”, because life is all about resilience, without it, we could not grow.
My favorite song on the album is “Lola James” which has a very different vibe from the rest of the tracks on Ouroboros. There is this haunting feel to the song, with whining guitar, fuzzed vocals, and lyrics “can’t quite hold your hand / doesn’t mean that I won’t reach”, “never seen your face”, and “What a pretty web your weaving / Lola James”.
I believe the track is a lullaby for his future daughter with lyrics “Standing in the snow / I hold your mom close to me / you were growing right inside her / still five months away / fall is coming soon / counting down the days” and the eerie feeling is the anticipation waiting for her to be born, nine months is a very long time.
It’s a very interesting idea for the song to have this haunting feel to it with hopeful lyrics, “this life is full of beauty / and there’s wonder in the night” and “don’t ever be afraid”, and the topic that it is about. But as stated before, the eeriness fits perfectly with terms of awaiting her arrival!
With Halloween just around the corner, “Lola James” will most definitely make my playlist!
Ouroboros will be out October 23rd via Spaceflight Records. Listen to the latest single here.
