Back in February of 2018, we wrote about a music video for the song ‘Gift’ by New Bern, North Carolina songwriter Jeremy Squires. It was one of several singles from a new album, titled Poem, that have been drip-fed into the world over the last year and a half.
Poem comes out this Friday (17th May), and today we have the pleasure of hosting the whole thing in full a few days ahead release. For anyone unfamiliar with Jeremy Squires, Poem is a good introduction to his heartfelt and emotionally wrought folk music. The music acts as a vehicle that delivers Squires’s explorations of life, love and death with maximum unpretentious emotional heft. “Poem is a collection of songs that tell a story” he describes. “My personal poetry set to music that document changes in my life as well as my loved ones.”
The album opens with the stirring strings and poignant piano of ‘What Could I Say?’, an instrumental intro that brings to mind Cloud Cult‘s brand of hopeful melancholy. The first track proper, ‘Somersault’ sees a return to the familiar blueprint of guitar and Squires’s gruff but earnest vocals. It’s a song about trying to deal with anxiety in a number of ways, Squires listing medications—Xanax and Risperdal and Depakote—as well as the reassurance of a loved one.
All twelve songs on Poem riff on this basic formula, Squires not content to make a basic guitar + vocals folk album. Instead he ventures into rock, country and elegant string-based compositions, capturing that complex cocktail of emotions that comes with the ups and downs of life. This may have something to do with his creative process. “When I’m working on an album I purposely don’t listen to anything ‘folky’ or anything that could be similar to my style,” he says. “That way I feel like what I’m playing is coming from a deeper place and not affected by other artists.”
“Your head is so heavy, it’s hanging like the moon tonight,” begins ‘Orchid’, the first of several songs about a moment of personal tragedy as Squires and his wife lost a baby. Andrew Joslyn + Passenger String Quartet provide a bittersweet romantic melancholy with violin, viola and cello, as Squires explores what he describes as “the mental and physical anguish that affected both of us” with bravery and directness. Elsewhere, ‘Ascending’ is a folk-rock ballad built on piano, while ‘A Calm Around’ sees Squires’s wife Shelley Ann Squires harmonize on vocals in a landscape of gathering shadows and post-rock drums.
Whit Wright’s pedal steel adds to the sense of elegiac nostalgia on ‘Golden’, a song Squires says is about “nearing forty and going back to the places of my youth and seeing how much everything has changed,” and ‘Heaven’ is what initially seems a lonely folk song elevated by strings and honest sentiment. ‘Gift’ closes the album, a track we described previously as “at once grandiose and melancholy […] but actually a heartfelt and tender love song, the titular gift revealing itself to be a person the narrator is very grateful for.” In this way, the album comes full circle from ‘Somersault’, the grief and pain and loss that comes in between making the human connection all the more precious.
Listen to the album in full in the player below:
You can pre-order Poem now from the Jeremy Squires Bandcamp page., where you can also find a specially designed t-shirt by Jasper Sek.
