Family, Place, and the Questions We Inherit
listen to the article
On Mr. Know it all, Jack Raymond returns to the things people carry: family history, the habits they fall into, and the relationships they try to sustain. The Australian folk, roots and blues songwriter approaches those subjects through familiar places and particular lives, letting one person’s story open onto a wider question.
Recorded with producer and engineer Ryan Tracey at Scribble Gum Farm on the Sunshine Coast, the album grew from three weeks of taking songs apart and finding what each needed. Electric guitars sit alongside acoustic instruments, pads and smaller details that broaden Raymond’s folk and blues foundations. Compared with the studio learning curve of his debut, The Long Story Short, this was a process with time to experiment. “We weren’t in a rush,” Raymond says. That patience gave him room to reconsider both the arrangements and his own instincts.
The title character emerged from Raymond’s frustration with inequality: a figure who could put the bloke on the street and the bloke in the penthouse on equal footing. Mr. Know it all isn’t a hero dispensing wisdom. His presence gives the record a way to ask what we choose, what we inherit, and how we might look after one another. Those questions connect songs whose settings and circumstances are otherwise quite different.
“Hollow Trees”
reaches back to Raymond’s childhood in Victoria’s High Country. A row of Paulownia trees planted by his parents grew alongside him, then began to collapse around the time their marriage did. “Prisoner” started as a song for a friend struggling with addiction before Raymond recognised parts of himself in it. “Ships in the Night” turns to his own relationship, tracing the difficulty of building a shared future around two very different working lives.
Elsewhere, “Break the Mould” pushes against a life lived on autopilot, while “Carpe Diem” asks what happens when the pursuit of the next thing gives way to noticing the present. “Dancing in Glory”, produced and engineered by JB Paterson, considers inherited beliefs and the freedom to question them. “Run Yandina Run” looks to the history held in the Australian landscape and the responsibility of keeping difficult stories alive.
Raymond calls the music Mountain Roots, a description shaped by regional towns, community halls, folk festivals and listening rooms. That connection to people and place runs through Mr. Know it all, giving its larger questions a recognisable scale. For all the certainty implied by the title, the album’s starting point is an admission: Raymond is still working things out, alongside the people in his songs.
If you would like to submit your music for playlist or feature consideration, please submit here via our partnership with MusoSoup.
