'Hail Bohemia' is out now
The album is dead. Long live the album.
My second full-length record, Hail Bohemia, is out everywhere today. It tells the story of three characters—Janey, Tommy, and Unnamed Narrator—who live in an unnamed city that is obviously Cambridge, Massachusetts. You can listen to it here.
Not everybody listens to whole albums these days, as any boomer will tell you. But still, my hope is that I can persuade you to find a pocket of time—maybe while you’re driving, or walking around the park, or doing laundry—to listen to this one from start to finish. My hope is that you will hear these songs in the way I intended them to be heard, so you can see how they go together to form a whole.
If you, like me, were the sort of kid who used to pore over album liner notes as though they contained holy and lasting truths—rather than, say, the lyrics to the Red Hot Chili Peppers’s 2006 hit “Snow (Hey Oh)”—you can follow along as you listen via these digital liner notes. Here’s one page:
If you’re looking for ways to help me spread the word, it’d mean so much if you’d share this release on social media (or with a friend in real life), and follow me on on your music platform of choice (Spotify, Bandcamp, or YouTube). These are quick things, but they do help me out a lot.
The lie that tells the truth
Long before it was an album, Hail Bohemia began its life as a short story, in which some of the characters had totally different names, but the Unnamed Narrator was still unnamed. After that, I worked on a novel involving the same three characters, but ultimately, they landed here, in this unconventional form. For a long time, I had written both fiction and songs, but this album represents my first attempt to consciously put the two together.
When I say that the album’s fiction, I mean it in the way the writer Neil Gaiman did when he called fiction “the lie that tells the truth.” I mean that my whole life is in the stories of these characters: the feeling of the New England winter as a child, when being inside an apartment felt like hiding inside a private snow globe, and the hours spent playing music with my friends out on the rocks in Gloucester as a teenager, and all the nights at venues like the Plough and Stars, the Cantab, TT the Bear’s Place, Great Scott, the Lizard Lounge, and Club Passim, seeing bands or playing in them, feeling close to my bandmates and friends in a wordless way—feeling that although the world was unknowable and our country was something much worse, we were safe there in that room as long as the music went on.
The bad nights and empty rooms are in here, too, and the creeping voice that whispers that the whole bohemian dream is in fact nothing but a bunch of smoke—that transcendence and art are just ever-receding carrots on a corporate stick, just a slick way of getting people to shop at Urban Outfitters and go to Coachella. For me, though, making music—making almost anything, actually— is one of the only reliable ways of pushing that sort of postmodern dread away. The sheer joy of making this record, across four states and three years, was a clear answer to cynicism and doubt, a reminder that this is an end in itself.
I wrote and recorded demos of all the songs in my New Haven apartment in the dead-cold Covid January of 2021, and sent them over to my longtime collaborator Devon Dawson, who signed on as co-producer and helped me make them real. We tracked bass and drums at Devon’s Beartone Studio with my bandmates Greg Hum and Alex LaRue, who managed to learn and track eight songs in two long, hot days.
Meanwhile, my dear and talented friend Rita Pfeiffer wrote beautiful string arrangements down in Nashville, and I flew down that November to record them in Rita’s home alongside the amazing Hannah Dorfman. Hannah played cello, and she also brought the character of Janey to life, singing almost all the vocals on the record that aren’t mine. Rita and Hannah are each incredible musicians and songwriters in their own right; go listen to them!
The album also features contributions from my favorite horns duo Tim Hall (saxophone) and Eric Seligman (trumpet)—AKA Tim and Eric Awesome Horns Great Job—plus regal trombone from Gabriel Rothman (on “Hail Bohemia”), country-fried lead guitar from Sam Bahman (on “Janey and I”), guest vocals from my hero VQnC (on “Borderline”), and upright bass from Daniel Seymour (on “Halloween”).
I am so grateful to each of these people for their invaluable friendship, their considerable labor, and their belief in this record. I’m also grateful to my teacher Nancy Reisman for patiently nurturing the short stories that would eventually become this record, and to Gillian Grogan, Becca Smith, Nat Schmookler, Eileen Shakespear, Paul Shakespear, Michael Holtz, Sam Bahman, Caitlin Thornbrugh, Hilary Bell, and Joe Kenkel for listening to early versions and giving feedback and encouragement. And of course, I owe it all to Eleanor Roberts, whose feedback at every stage shaped the record. Eleanor has listened to these songs (and my anxieties around them) more than anyone, and somehow, she still seems to like them (and me).
All right - thanks for being here. This album is dedicated to my friend Tyler Cox, and to the songs we used to sing out on the rocks, late at night.
Much love, J
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Hail Bohemia Release Shows:
5/18 - Cambridge, MA - The Lilypad (Tickets)
5/26 - New Haven, CT - Gather East (6 pm, tickets at door)
6/1 - New York, NY - Berlin Under A (Tickets)