“I’d get away from that body / there’s nothing left we can do / and if I ever come back from the country / I’m going swimming with you.” So sings Portland, Maine songwriter and painter Greg Jamie in the opening lines of ‘I’d Get Away’, the first track from his new album Across a Violet Pasture, forthcoming this autumn via Orindal Records. The cryptic, almost contradictory verse is a fitting introduction for a full-length which exists at the intersection of things. The real and unreal, the physical and spiritual, the personal, the historical and the mythic. One which does not so much blur the boundary between such categories as embrace their duality, the real world punctuated with high strangeness and vice versa, the known and unknown superimposed. The result is undeniably weird yet intrinsically human, demonstrated by an opening verse where the image of floating away from the body is paired with the pleasure of floating within it. As though to exist is to both long for transcendence from coroporeal reality and desire an unending experience of bodily sensation. We want to feel forever, yet wish for something more.
Like all of Greg Jamie’s work, the album is a singular vision, yet that is not to say he did not have help bringing it to life. Guests across the record include Robert Pycior (violin), Elisabeth Fuchsia (viola), Mark Fede (drums), Josephine Foster (backing vocals), Keith J Nelson (clarinet, bass clarinet), Tom Kovacevic (ney flute), Michael Cormier O’Leary (drums) and David Rogers-Berry (additional percussion), not to mention long-time collaborator Colby Nathan (bass, synth, guitar, vocals, and “de facto interpreter of ideas”). Each musician helps Jamie venture out into a world of his own making, slipping between styles and genres with the seamless yet striking logic of a dream. “The strength of Across a Violet Pasture is its intuitive rawness,” as Claire Cronin writes in the album notes:
It’s art made at home; the product of a deep inner life and a personal mythology. And like Greg Jamie’s uncanny watercolor paintings, this record juxtaposes muted, dark backgrounds with shocks of vibrant color. The “violet pasture” of the title evokes a mix of passionate red and cool, sorrowful blue. The resulting purple is mystical and a little extravagant. It’s a color hardly found in nature. And when it is, like the violet flower, it survives only in dappled forest shade. Admired by hermits, fauns, and idealistic weirdos, there’s a secretive, melancholy, and ephemeral beauty to this work.
The true pleasure of such an album is found only in setting off for a journey of your own, immersing yourself in the vast, intricate landscapes, pondering the ambiguous imagery and existential musings over repeated listens. But for now ‘I’d Get Away’ stands as the first leg of the trip. A taste of the wider experience in miniature. The song a small world of its own. “Making [‘I’d Get Away’] felt like a breakthrough for the whole record for me, sonically,” Jamie explains. “It’s sort of a surf ballad about letting go of what you can’t change, and moving on from what is final. Transcendence and fog. Clarity after death. Blow up nostalgia and just be. Check out that slide and drift away.”
Photo by Paige Jamie Bedard, album artwork by Greg Jamie with design and layout by Gordon Ashworth