Jeremy Ferrara is a songwriter based in Portland, Oregon who centres his practice on openness and sincerity. Most often recording songs with nothing more than his voice and guitar, Ferrara conjures warm and welcoming songs within which he invites the listener, conjuring spaces which favour vulnerability and allow genuine empathy to be realised. This summer sees the release of full-length album, Everything I Hold on American Standard Time Records, a collection of songs that develops this sensibility more fully than ever before.
Opening track and lead single ‘Morning Light’ serves as the perfect introduction to this style. It is a song that explores “inner peace found through movement, place, freedom, love,” Ferrara explains, “and the strange intersection of these different but similar forces.” This peace emerges through the track, not in the form of some New Age bliss but rather something modest and imperfect and beautiful. Quiet joys coloured by sadness, where impermanence can be mourned but never resented, and is perhaps the key to finding contentment after all.
So I thank you Northwest Sky
I thank you open road
I thank you morning light
For you I’ll never be aloneSo now everything’s changed, taken a different name
Taken a different weight in my life
This whole book’s busted open wide
I’m just a page drifting away in the night
