Originally recording under the moniker Boy Rex, Michigan songwriter Jack M. Senff decided to start using his own name for his music after taking a year away to evaluate his intentions. The change in guise goes deeper than the name too, with debut LP Good To Know You shifting away from the specific sound of Boy Rex in favour of something a little more restrained and considered, rounding off the edges and allowing a quieter, more gentle tone to form.
Mixed and mastered by Mike Kenway (William Bonney, In Ghosts), Good To Know features appearances from Brian Morgante (DEADHORSE, Flesh and Bone Design), Shannon Lee Stott-Rigsbee (Tyler Daniel Bean, Adrian Ardvark), his wife Em Randall and Arthur Shroeder (After Ours), all working to illuminate Jack M. Senff’s wistful delivery. Concerned with the inexorable flow of time and the way it colours our experiences of love and loss, Senff uses his pensive lilt to craft a nuanced and emotive sound.
We’re happy to share a video for the single ‘Old Days’ by way of introduction to the album. Fully on-board with the record’s themes, and drawing on Chris Staples as inspiration, the song presents a kind of melancholic fondness, where the compulsive need to change butts up against the affection for things as they stand. “Picked a point on a map and said I’m going there,” Senff sings, “with all my clothes and old guitars in the backseat.” The destination is not important but rather the process of moving, as though through change will eventually come some form of answer. “Restless heart, I thought: be still,” he continues, “If this don’t settle me then nothing will.”
Of course, instigating change means losing something of the present, and the song’s Western twang is just as concerned with what stands to be lost. Indeed, there is something of a melodramatic air to the sound, a cowboy self-sacrifice and commitment to unshaped dreams, where the ideals of past and future force the present into a constant, if vague sense of yearning—the suspicion that the better times have been and gone balanced by the insistent hope that something special is waiting just over the horizon.
It was a blue goodbye
when I said I’d see you before long
Just look for me when the spring comes
I’ll sing you the light of a new song
Good To Know You will be released on the September 6th via Skeletal Lightning.