Jeffrey Martin

On a small corner lot in southeast Portland, Oregon, Jeffrey Martin holed up through the winter recording his quietly potent new album Thank God We Left The Garden. Long nights bled into mornings in the tiny shack he built in the backyard, eight feet by ten feet. What began as demos meant for a later visit to a proper studio became the album itself, spare and intimate and true. Recorded live and alone around two microphones, Jeffrey often held his breath to wait for the low diesel hum of a truck to pass one block over on the busy thoroughfare. During the coldest nights, he timed recording between the clicks of the oil coil heater cycling on and off.

Martin’s fourth full length album, Thank God We Left The Garden comes out on Portland’s beloved Fluff and Gravy Records Nov __. He produced and engineered it himself, recalling, “There was a magic quality to the sounds I was getting in the shack with these two cheap microphones, some lucky recipe of time and place that allowed my voice and the way I play guitar and the shape of these new songs to come together with the kind of honesty I was craving.”

So much has happened in the world since the release of his previous album One Go Around (heralded by No Depression as ‘the poetry of America’), and Jeffrey has filled the time doggedly, but happily, touring the US and Europe, watching it all unfold in a stream of small town conversations and city sprawl. In a moment where depth is so often traded for the instantaneous, where tech billionaires are building rockets to escape the planet, where the dead-eyed stare of artificial intelligence is promising to existentially upend our world, and where divisiveness in our culture is breeding delusional levels of certainty, Jeffrey Martin’s new record feels like a hopeful and fully human antidote.

BOB SUMNER

Talking about traditional music—country, Americana, folk—gets a little sticky for Bob Sumner. His problem isn’t with the music itself, of course; one spin through his forthcoming sophomore album will assure you that the Canadian singer-songwriter can appreciate the finer points of steel guitar, fiddle, and strong storytelling. Rather, Sumner takes issue with the idea that the only way to honor the genre’s greats is to play music exactly the way they did. On Some Place to Rest Easy, you’ll hear countrypolitan strings alongside ambient sensibilities; tasteful synth tracks followed seamlessly by numbers with dobro and steel guitar. The result is an album that takes as much inspiration from the audio production of Randy Travis as it does the lyrical soul of Big Thief’s Adrienne Lenker—a melding of eras, sounds, concepts, and stylings that’s informed by the past, but never bound by it.