HIP Video Promo Presents: Robbie Mangiardi releases new music video for ‘Wayward Wind’

Robbie Mangiardi Draws From Roots as Deep as the Country's Troubles on New Single "Wayward Wind"

CA, UNITED STATES, March 27, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- There’s a certain kind of songwriter who doesn’t announce himself right away. Robbie Mangiardi spent years writing like that—quietly, almost out of sight—while life moved in other directions. Growing up in New York, he was surrounded by music early on, from Broadway stages to film soundtracks to whatever drifted through the city. At 18, he made his way to Woodstock. The impression stayed with him. He pulls from a pretty wide range: The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman, Mississippi John Hurt, Aaron Copland. You can hear elements of folk, blues, jazz, and rock move through his work, but nothing feels locked in.

He started writing young and never really stopped. For a long time, though, the songs didn’t go much further than where they were written. More out of habit than anything deliberate, Mangiardi kept that work close, even as his life unfolded elsewhere. While juggling a career as an actor and musician, and other side jobs along the way, he faced setbacks, including drug and alcohol addiction and a year-and-a-half jail stint in the 1970s that shaped how he understood people and consequences, and he has been clean for almost 25 years. The writing continued through all of it, often privately, sometimes just to see if a feeling would settle once it had somewhere to go.

That stretch eventually gave way to a first formal release. “The People You Love,” issued in 2021 and produced by Herb Pedersen of the Desert Rose Band, arrived after decades of largely unseen work and reached the top ten on the American Roots Report Americana chart, with three singles landing there as well. Since then, he’s played selectively around Los Angeles, paying close attention to how a room sounds as much as how a performance feels. He continues to write steadily, at his own pace, with brand new material taking shape. Live shows remain occasional by design. After years of keeping songs to himself, Mangiardi seems less interested in urgency than in timing—waiting until something holds together before letting it go, even if that takes longer than expected.

“Wayward Wind,” his new single, dates back to around 2017, when something in the country’s mood began to register with him, though it wasn’t the kind of thing you could easily point to or explain at the time. He couldn’t quite pin it down, but it stayed with him, and over the past year, it came into clearer focus. Produced with percussionist Martin Flores, bassist Rene Camacho, pedal steel player Bob Bernstein, and keyboardist Neil Rosengarden, the track brings together musicians with long histories behind them, each leaving space where it matters. “It is an appeal to our better selves… to get a grip to a higher calling,” Mangiardi says.

His approach to sound isn’t tied to a single lane. After writing and arranging, he pays attention to what he describes as vibration and frequency, the physical and emotional pull of the track, or at least the part of it you can’t really measure but know when it’s there. Mangiardi also directed the video for “Wayward Wind,” building it from his own storyboard before handing visual execution to Thai artist JAY JAY Kerospath, who rendered the imagery using AI. The scenes move loosely, slipping into one another without ever quite settling, which gives the whole creative effort a slightly unsettled feel. It circles ideas of division and distance without naming them outright, and doesn’t rush to resolve any of it. “Wayward Wind” captures the zeitgeist and during troubled, challenging times like we’re all experiencing, it makes us feel less alone.

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Andrew Gesner
HIP Video Promo
+1 732-613-1779
info@hipvideopromo.com

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