Jacob Augustine Interview: We All Get Wrung Through the Same Wringer
Photo by Joshua Powers
BY JORDAN MAINZER
When I called singer-songwriter Jacob Augustine in early May, some hours before a show in Madison, Wisconsin, he was still in Chicago, having played The Burlington the night prior. "I stayed with a few pals last night and we've been chewing the fat this morning," he said. By the end of our 75-minute conversation, it would become apparent that Augustine's the type of guy to spend long portions of time sitting and talking, whether about old country music or the darkest parts of his soul. His latest album I Love You Forever, his first for Team Love and first in 10 years overall, was written over a decade ago after Augustine lost his grandmother, who was suffering from Alzheimer's, and his mother, whose picture adorns the album cover, to cancer. That it didn't see the light of day until now is a story of experiencing, and ultimately overcoming, severe anguish, that Augustine would tell me over the course of our talk. I Love You Forever isn't just about grief; it's a wholesale channeling of a life's worth of trauma into a raw, intense, stunning collection of songs.
Augustine's relocated a lot in his life, but the years that shaped who he is today--spent both as a child and as an adult--were in Maine. He grew up Catholic in Lincoln, a conservative, largely white paper mill town, in the 80's and 90's, forming a community of outcasts and playing in a death metal band with his brother, cousin, and two best friends. His father taught him and his brother to box. His religious mother accepted them, allowing them to practice in the basement; the majority of the town, on the other hand, did not. Other kids would harass and haze Augustine's crew by calling them racial slurs. Augustine and his brother would often get in fights, mostly with kids their age, sometimes at school. Even the teachers cheered for the other students. "I had a scheduled fight in the parking lot by a beach once, and the football assistant coach was there to watch, which is just insane, a grown adult there to watch students from his school fight each other," Augustine said. One time, he and his brother, 16 and 18, fought two grown men in their 30's in the middle of the street, one of them a military policeman who was on leave. Regaling me with these stories, Augustine chuckled, but he made sure to clarify that his laughter was a front for how he felt deep down. "I might sound like I'm proud of this stuff, but it's unfortunate and sad," he said. "It was very traumatic growing up that way. You're living in this sleepy little Stephen King town, and you're constantly looking over your shoulder when you're walking down the hallways in school."
I Love You Forever album art
Eventually, Augustine left Lincoln for California to play metal, and his band Donnybrook (later Red Cloud Revival after threats from an L.A. hardcore band called Donnybrook!) landed a demo deal but never broke through. When he returned to Maine to be his grandmother's live-in caretaker, his appreciation for Delta blues, classic country, and Americana deepened, as she played him Hank Williams and Patsy Cline. As his grandmother's condition worsened, his mother was diagnosed with cancer, the day after retiring. It was then when the seeds of I Love You Forever were born, the album written as Augustine's mother was undergoing treatment and dying. Its climax, the sparse, wailed, 8-minute "Philadelphia Lights", is the most biographical song on the album, named after the city in which she received cancer treatment, and naming Augustine's mom by name: "Jane, if I could say one last thing, it would be, 'Damn it all, they made you tough," he cries out. "She did everything right," Augustine said. "She did what everyone told her to do, she had the job, she raised three kids on her own, and then it was all taken away from her." Cancer took her life, and in a uniquely American cruel joke, medical bills left her penniless. Augustine connected growing up in Lincoln with not just the mental toll it took on his life, but the physical toll it took on everyone. "You could scrape the sulfur off of cars in the morning. Our cars would be yellow with dust," he said. "You can't help but draw these comparisons to why your mother may be sick and the capitalist system that stressed her out so much while she was sick, with the insurance companies switching plans, kicking her off the plans, finding ways to complicate things and make her more stressed out."
Augustine doesn't recall much of the time writing and recording I Love You Forever, blocking out that time of his life when he faced so much loss. After the core band, including Hamilton Belk (pedal steel), Peter McLaughlin (drums), and Asher Platts (bass), laid down the tracks, they toured the songs for two weeks. Augustine followed with a two-week tour of his own. Then, his mom passed away, and he retreated. He claims to have "absolutely zero recollection" of playing a remembrance show for Portland musician Johnny Fountain, who died of cancer shortly after his mom did. He built a house in the woods of Greenbush, Maine, a town with one store, and disappeared, working on music that wasn't his own and for cannabis guerrilla growers. He abused substances himself. "As people in the family seemed to be healing and moving forward in a positive way, I was stuck in this cycle of hell and self-loathing," Augustine said. "I was extremely depressed. I was very close to Mom when she was fighting [cancer]. It leaves a lot of images in your head and moments that are impossible to forget. There are sometimes images and scenarios you do want to forget, and you think you have, and then you lay down at night and they're flashed in your head again and you just want to rip your head off your shoulders."
Augustine attributed his reclusive reaction to his mom's passing to something he only found out about four years ago: that he suffers from bipolar disorder. It meant that the songs on I Love You Forever sat unmixed and unmastered, and that Augustine couldn't even play music without "breaking down and crying and choking up." Instead, he opted to play old country music in nursing homes and Delta blues in bars. A few years before the pandemic, Augustine left Greenbush and moved to Winterport, where he lived during it. After COVID, he moved to Waterville to manage a permaculture for a farm-to-table restaurant at which a friend was the head chef. "I hadn't yet been diagnosed with bipolar [disorder] yet, so I was losing my mind on that job, thinking to myself, 'You should be singing to people,'" Augustine said. His friends in the Philadelphia band Friendship had signed to Merge. "I was really happy for them, but I thought, 'You're blowing it. You're not doing what you should be doing. Good things are happening to great musicians putting in the work, and you need to get back out there."
After being diagnosed, Augustine moved to Philadelphia, spending 70 hours a week driving for Lyft. The experience was grueling, but he knew his lowest points were because of his mood disorder. "You gotta go through it to get through it, as they say," Augustine said. "I wanted to simplify my life and play music all the time again. I started [making] my life [choices scientifically]: 'Does music have an impact on people? Yes.'" So he made moves to pick back up on I Love You Forever, to get it mixed and mastered. In the meantime, last year, he moved to Brussels to busk in the street, and then the UK, and then Ireland. Suddenly, Augustine received fruitful offers to play shows in the U.S., including an opening slot for Portland legend Lady Lamb, a longtime friend of his. Someone who worked at the Portland Public Library had attended the Lady Lamb show and asked Augustine to do a set at the Library. Nate Krenkel of Team Love happened to be at that Library show, and signed Augustine within two days to release the finally finished version of I Love You Forever.
The record release, however, is nowhere near the end of the story; its songs are a window into both Augustine's mind, his past, his empathy, his penance. A tune like the slow-burning "Animal Orchard", originally recorded for his 2011 Goldyhymns EP, now rife with gentle layers of guitar and pedal steel and rich, fluttering strings courtesy of Peter Broderick, juxtaposes Augustine's history in his childhood, looking over his shoulder, to the story of someone he loved. "They had suffered some pretty serious trauma in their life," Augustine said. "I remember watching them move in a club through a crowded room, and seeing her eyes and how she was looking, almost like she was checking her blind spots all the time. She had an inability to relax because of all this trauma she had undergone." On the tune, he sings, "We drink like a violent hibernation infancy syndrome;" he reworded his thoughts to me more succinctly: "Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do bad things happen at all?" Call it lapsed Catholicism combined with healthy skepticism. Augustine likened his concept of god to Nick Cave's, who gives credence to a higher power simply because it's consistent with someone else's reality. "I don't believe in an interventionist god / But I know, darling, that you do," Cave famously sang on "Into My Arms". "That kind of ominous ever-present vibe who can intervene is something that was burned into my brain," Augustine said. Yet, the god who exists on I Love You Forever is imperfect and can't change much; Augustine compares them to Willem DaFoe's Jesus in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. They oversee, rather than futilely attempt to stop, atrocities on "The General's Son". On "Animal Orchard", Augustine sings from this god's point of view: "Eternity, it breaks my heart so far / I hardly get a break."
One of the most striking aspects of I Love You Forever is the way Augustine writes about his grief in the broader context of societal ills. "What I was seeing going on in the world...it seemed like I had been seeing that since I was a child," Augustine said. "Why we become diseased, because of our system of food, lack of regulation on environmental protections." Another key disease Augustine tackles head-on, on I Love You Forever, is racism. Having lived in Los Angeles and returning back to rural Maine was not necessarily a culture shock for a person who grew up there, but a forced reintroduction to cultural rot. "I was used to living in more metropolitan areas, around artistic communities, and [then] I was pretty much living in a very red, what we would [now call] MAGA area," Augustine said. "I grew up in this area, too, [but] it was like I was living in the last place I ever wanted to live." His confrontational streak bubbled up. "I'm kind of a rural American redneck's worst nightmare at a bar," he laughed. "I'll get a little too tipsy and get in their faces and start asking questions. I'm a bonafide problem when I'm in areas like that, and I kind of spiral out of control. That stress put a lot of those other ideas into the music."
Multiple songs on I Love You Forever reference slavery, specifically. On opener "Medulla Burning Down", over country western guitars and pedal steel, Augustine booms, "And when she pulled out the needle / John Wayne's voice came through the speakers / He asked, 'Ma'am, will you marry me? / And what color would you like your slaves to be?'" On rollicking waltz "Peril", Augustine details "Yellow roses and white people dancing in old black tuxedos from the plantation auction." When I asked Augustine why he included this part of U.S. history on I Love You Forever, he wasn't sure. "Besides being an American, I don't think I have a direct relationship to that history," Augustine said. "But it's very hard not to see and very hard not to have that in your mind the whole time if you're being conscientious and living in this place." He knows singing about it can make people uncomfortable; hopefully, he makes the right people uncomfortable. "It makes me nervous to sing it sometimes, because I know how heavy it is, and I know how deeply it touches communities who were most affected by it. What I find mostly is that those communities appreciated it." He told me about a time playing in Carrboro, North Carolina when he opened the show with "Medulla Burning Down" and cleared out the entire room [of white people] upon singing, "What color would you like your slaves to be?" "They just didn't want to hear it, face it, and accept the truth of it. Maybe that's why it's in the music. You hear that all the time with these people. 'Why don't you just forget about it? Can't we just move on?' Shit like that. Maybe that's why it appears in my art a lot, because of people like that. I want to put it in their faces so they can try to face it and find some kind of reckoning and healing from that history." Oh, and Augustine didn't really clear out the entire room that night. "On the brighter side of things, the guys working at the bar that night loved it and gave me free drinks all night," he guffawed.
Eventually in our conversation, Augustine chose to share something that he thinks explains why systemic racism and slavery pop up in his songwriting as often as they do: that his great grandfather was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. "I used to see pictures of them growing up, of them marching down the street in my hometown," Augustine said. "I want to even the scale. Some of my ancestors--and I'm sure if we wind it back, a lot of our ancestors have done some pretty heinous shit--[have] been on the wrong side of history in drastic ways." The first song Augustine ever wrote, in 7th grade, was a tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr. "I just always wanted to offset that energy," he said. "To know that my kind contributed to this horrible, evil, racist energy on this planet made me feel like I needed to do the opposite of that. You can't make it right, but to find some way to not even balance it but overbalance it, to weigh the scale even more so on the side of good and love." The album's first mention of slavery alluded to in conjunction with John Wayne is no accident. Watch many old Westerns, and the characters Wayne and other leading men of the time played, considered heroes, spew awful white supremacist talking points. On "Philadelphia Lights", Augustine sings, "Do we hate the sin but love the sinner?" From contemporary audiences brushing off racism because it comes from the mouth of the likes of Wayne, to as of a few days ago, Democratic Senators purifying the record of their recently deceased war hawk colleague and friend Lindsey Graham, it's the type of observation you continue to notice all around you after you hear the line.
Even though Augustine doesn't remember the day-in, day-out of making I Love You Forever, its subject matter is such that performing the songs puts him in the moods and head spaces he was in when he wrote the songs. It's emotionally taxing. "I normally crawl into a hole after I play my sets," he said. "It's kind of a lot to put yourself through night after night, but it's worth it. It connects to people really strongly." At the time of our interview, he hadn't played "Philadelphia Lights" since he recorded it, but he was inspired to do so after hearing his former label-mate James Smith--who records under the moniker Good Good Blood--play the title track of his 2025 album Little Sparrow at Augustine's request when the two played a show together in the UK. "I didn't really know what the song was about," Augustine said. "When I got to the club, I learned it was about a serious loss that he had encountered. He was going to play it, and he did, and he played it in front of me. I could see how much it was tearing him up. At that moment, I was like, okay, that's what bravery looks like. I need to start playing 'Philadelphia Lights' at some point. If James can do that for me, on request, then I should certainly be able to do that for everybody else." Augustine's music has had a similar affect on his own audiences. "I've had people come up to me after shows, and they can't stop crying," he said. "It's put them in such a particular headspace that they can't shake it off and have to leave the room. Or they're leaving the venue with tears in their eyes. It's definitely palpable, the connection. It's an honor, honestly, to be able to share that with everyone."
Augustine already has a new record mostly finished, focusing on the time period in his life after that which inspired I Love You Forever. "It's definitely a lot more of a reflection album," he said. "There are a lot of mourning songs on there, and a lot of songs reflecting on my childhood when my parents were together...It's a pretty personal record. I'd say it's more personal than I Love You Forever because it's specifically about my own life." Its aesthetic, purportedly, leans further into classic country, its tone optimistic. "Maybe there's more hope in it...Not a moving on, but a growing into a healthier tree type of vibe, or something. Healing and becoming more like an oak, smiling in the face of despair rather than wallowing in it." If one thing's for sure, audiences will still be able to connect with it, even if they share nothing in common with Augustine's biography. Months later after our conversation, it's this pearl of wisdom that's stuck in my head and continued to reverberate: "We all suffer the same things. They may happen at different times in our lives, but we all get wrung through the same wringer eventually."
