New Bern, North Carolina songwriter Jeremy Squires has recently released not one but two new releases. The first is a brand new single, ‘Diminish’, Squires’s first new music since last year’s album Poem.
The song was the result of a moment of sudden inspiration. “I had a guitar riff that I was messing around with the day before this track was recorded,” Squires describes. “A good friend of mine that I hadn’t seen in years called me up and asked if I’d like to come over and jam. We just pressed record and I started playing the riff and he played drums. I went home and I played bass to it, wrote the lyrics and recorded them all that same night.”
Squires says the song is “about saying goodbye or not having a proper goodbye or closure,” and like much of his music has deep religious undertones. The lyrics are relatively minimal and opaque, shrouding the track in a sense of mystery as Squires addresses an unknown “you.” Fittingly, this is not one of Squires’s straight folk songs, but rather a slow and weighty slice of Americana, thick with a sense of consequence and regret.
The single comes complete with a video, shot and edited by Squires himself, which he says the feelings of “decay, abandonment and unanswered questions,” that permeate the song. Check it out below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8ymRx_kDsU
The second release is the self-explanatory A Collection of Covers, a mini-album of other people’s songs Squires has recorded over the past few years. He’s chosen wisely, with songs from legends such as Jason Molina, Damien Jurado, Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Pedro the Lion, all of whom have discernible influence on Squires’s music. There is also a take on Nirvana’s ‘Heart Shaped Box’, the achingly emotive ‘Rust or Gold’ by Jill Andrews, and ‘The Bluebird of Happiness’ by Lotte Kestner, the latter opening in twinkling glockenspiel before the entrance of Squires’s comparatively gruff vocals and smoothly emotive piano.
They are songs linked not by sound but a common feeling, something that can be traced back to Squires’s own work. As he puts it, “the song has to feel like I could’ve written or something I wished I had written and hit me like a ton of bricks.”
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You can get ‘Diminish’ and A Collection of Covers from the Jeremy Squires Bandcamp page.