#greg jamie

Jamie is a visual artist and filmmaker, too, so you can make out fleeting imagery and narrative threads amid hovering sonics.  His music has the same unearthly playfulness as Chad Van Gaalen’s song, an artifact, perhaps, of thinking in pictures. 

The spectral quality emerges from plain-spoken instrumentation, like the ghosts that might turn up in old photographs of staid, 19th century burghers.  “Distant Shore,” for instance, makes use of a trebly, diffident strumming, a mandolin perhaps, as it spins out its vocal melody.  There’s nothing especially strange about either element, but the pitch and echo give the sense of a spiritual opening.  The ordinary world lives right next to the fantastical in these songs. 

“I Wanted More” is swathed in electric guitar overtones, its plaintive singing wreathed in auditory uncertainty.  The melody, though, is strong enough to win out, cresting effortlessly over the murk and mystery.  It’s a cut that might remind you of Damien Jurado’s run with Richard Swift, grounded but full of wonder. 

Jamie is centered in folk, never more so than in the droning, plinking, modal “Time Has a Way,” a Brit-folk lament that slants, sometimes towards the Middle East.  “When I Die” has the same trudging, ritual propulsion, a slow march towards epiphany, or, perhaps, oblivion.  “When I die, I die with the flowers,” Jamie sings, poking at the old questions of why we’re here and where we’re going, as folk artists have done forever.  Yet the mystery is fresh and close and present, in music that lets the spiritual into this world and vice versa.