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. 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. There are holes in all the side walls where the wind it brings the rain in And the gold crowns have been found out to be brass that has been painted There are holes in all our bibles where we make secret compartments To hide the broken treasures we smuggled out of the garden -Quiet Man The sounds feel warm, close, and refreshingly real, all held up by the richness and rare candor of Jeffrey’s voice. Production is restrained mostly to his guitar and vocals, with flashes of classical guitar for a tumbling wash of melody and low end color. Martin’s voice sits high above everything, reaching into new melodic territory that goes beyond his earlier work. “I feel like I’ve only just learned how to sing,” Martin said. “Like I’ve been chasing this record since my very first recordings. I wanted to really see what I could do, just my guitar and my voice and little else. I don’t think it was conscious. I think maybe it was a reaction to the pace of life these days. The churning news and entertainment and politics and violence of it all. I needed to know that even in this day and age, just a few simple ingredients still hold up.” Beloved Portland-based guitarist Jon Neufeld added electric guitar to three tracks. At its core Thank God We Left The Garden is an album made of questions, humble and nuanced, a reverent celebration of the asking. In my mind there’s a garden, full of beauty and darkness Full of sorrow and sweet things where my heart can be honest In that garden there’s a fruit tree and I eat from it daily The same that Adam and Eve ate / what does that make me? -Garden Whether singing about his own internal landscape, telling a story of someone else’s, or reflecting on the elusive relationship between scarcity and contentment, Martin’s writing never pushes the listener away, never points a finger. He sings of things we can all pin a memory on, holding the rough shorn gem of human experience up to the light. There’s a treasure that we all know but we can’t have it / It’s a place beyond the measure of our minds It is where we go when we forget we’re living / It is where we go when we forget we die . . . And all the tools we use to feel important / they are useless as a sailboat in the sky Where old bones and heart aches are forgotten / It’s a place we don’t have words to describe The sun will rise like it always does on the day that I die The world will spin, the sun will go on burning Never even knowing I was alive -There Is A Treasure Thank God We Left the Garden will be released on Fluff and Gravy Records in the fall of 2023. Subsequent touring will carry Jeffrey Martin through all of the US, Canada, and Europe.
