Back in 2017, Portland, Oregon songwriter Jeffrey Martin released One Go Around, a collection of songs on Fluff & Gravy Records which dealt with the age old issues of love, loss and work which got at something at the heart of the American experience. Where a sense of duty and pride is always shadowed by the nagging doubt things should be better, and no amount of work ethic can compensate for the lack of funds in the bank. What emerged was an album both nostalgic and cutting, fond of the past and teased by unreachable futures, watched over by a God who seemed to exist for other such men.
This November sees Jeffrey Martin return with Thank God We Left The Garden, an brand new record again on Fluff & Gravy and Loose Music. The album is an attempt to confront the drastic changes the world has experienced in the interim while still dealing with the old themes too. The climate is collapsing, diseases rising, robots striving to take over the globe, and still there’s not enough money for the people who actually need it. Still the future holds a distant promise, the past haunts with its glory and regret. The album was recorded live and alone with two microphones, a simplicity at odds with the spiralling complications of the world in which it was born. “I’ve been chasing this record since my very first recordings,” as Martin explains:
I wanted to really see what I could do, just my guitar and my voice and little else. I don’t think it was conscious. I think maybe it was a reaction to the pace of life these days. The churning news and entertainment and politics and violence of it all. I needed to know that even in this day and age, just a few simple ingredients still hold up.
Lead single ‘There Is a Treasure’ is a case in point. An attempt to disconnect from the overwhelming anxieties of our time by imagining those forces larger than us. Call it nature, call it time, call it God Himself and all he created. “This is a thankful ode to all that remains out of reach,” as Martin puts it. “To the brief glimpses of a place beyond time and worry, beyond death even, where we live purely and forever in the here and now and it stretches out past all measure. And in that place we feel ourselves as beautifully unimportant, untethered from the din of our daily angst, a single part of the huge mystery of existence.”
There’s a treasure we all know but we can’t have it
It’s a place beyond the measure of our minds
It is where we go when we forget we’re living
It is where we go when we forget we die
Check out the video featuring Anna Tivel below:
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Thank God We Left The Garden is out via Loose Music and Fluff & Gravy Records on the 3rd November and you can pre-order it from the Jeffrey Martin Bandcamp page.
