ALL AGES
STANDING ROOM ONLY
Growing up, Jonathon Linaberry was obsessed with the radio.
“I remember sitting there at night, glued to the boombox, cassette player ready to record whenever my favorite songs came on,” he recalls. “There was something so thrilling about it, something romantic that I think we’ve lost now that everything’s available at our fingertips. I wanted to find a way to get back to that place, to recapture those feelings of excitement and anticipation and possibility.”
Linaberry does precisely that on Radio Waves, his sixth studio album as The Bones Of J.R. Jones. Recorded in Toronto with producer Robbie Lackritz (Feist, Bahamas), the collection is moody and hypnotic, steeped in the sonic landscape of the ’80s and ’90s as it excavates the past with equal parts nostalgia and curiosity. The arrangements are utterly entrancing here, built on the tension between acoustic instruments and retro synthesizers, and Linaberry’s performances are raw and visceral, at times aching in their vulnerability. Put it all together and you’ve got a poignant exploration of memory and longing delivered by a relentless searcher, a revelatory work of personal reflection steeped in the endless beauty, pain, and chaos of youth.
“I’ve never really resonated with the idea of ‘the good old days,’” Linaberry reflects. “Your understanding of the past and your relationship with it change as you get older, and I’ve always been more interested in the evolution of those feelings than in wearing any kind of rose-colored glasses.”
Born and raised in central New York, Linaberry got his start playing in hardcore and punk bands before becoming enamored with the field recordings of Alan Lomax, who documented rural American blues, folk, and gospel musicians throughout the 1930s and ’40s. Inspired by the unvarnished honesty of those vintage performances, Linaberry launched The Bones of J.R. Jones in 2012 and, operating as a fully independent artist, began releasing a series of critically acclaimed albums and EPs that would land his songs in a slew of films and television shows (including True Detective, Suits, Daredevil, Longmire, and Graceland) and lead to countless tours across the US and Europe (including stops everywhere from Telluride Blues to Hardly Strictly Bluegrass). Along the way, Linaberry also shared bills with the likes of The Wallflowers, G. Love, and The Devil Makes Three, soundtracked an Amazon commercial helmed by Oscar-winning director Taika Waititi, and earned praise from Billboard, American Songwriter, Under the Radar, and more.
“After a dozen years of touring and recording, I found myself getting burnt out by the constant barrage of new music that’s out there,” Linaberry reflects. “In some ways, it’s great to have that kind of access, but it can also be numbing, and I found myself missing what it felt like to have an album change your life, to listen to your cassette of Born In The USA so many times you have to wind the tape back up with a pencil.”
Linaberry set out to tap back into that magic on Radio Waves, writing songs steeped in the sounds and stories of his own coming of age. He tuned out the modern world in favor of stark, lo-fi demos built around fingerpicked guitars and old school electronics, and when it came time to record the album, he leaned into working with an outside producer for the first time, traveling to Canada for two ten-day sessions at Lackritz’s studio.
