Songs That Leave Room For Doubt
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On “No Price on Earth”, an ordinary day of calm carries more weight than any purchase. It is a modest starting point for Music by Jeremy‘s Scenes from a Well Worn Path (Side Three), and a revealing one. The Banbury artist’s six-song release turns outward after the more personal focus of its two predecessors, approaching the world’s contradictions through scenes that keep the individual in view. He sets out problems and leaves room to live with them.
His songs often start in a familiar domestic pause: guitar in hand, waiting for his partner to finish getting ready at the weekend. Words and one acoustic guitar remain at the centre of what follows. Jeremy develops demos in Ableton, testing arrangements with AI tools before bringing the parts back into the session. He plays acoustic guitar and fretless bass himself, using AI-assisted drums, lead guitar and vocals, with the vocal model trained on samples of his own voice. It is an iterative method: the shape of a song can change through repeated demos, while the original guide lyric often survives with only small revisions.
His named influences include Lennon, Dylan, Randy Newman and Bowie, but Jeremy describes the people he has loved and observed as the deeper source of the writing. That distinction matters to a project conceived as a musical autobiography across 24 tracks and four sides. “I’m very aware of my own frailties and contradictions. That’s why I’m writing songs and not standing for parliament.” The remark gives the outward turn its perspective. There is political curiosity here, held alongside an awareness of his own limits.
“Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” takes its title from Keynes’s 1930 essay and opens with a quotation from Macbeth. The song considers the distance between promised abundance and the lives it actually made possible, using the image of a locked door and a room of people eating. Beside it, the calm of “No Price on Earth” becomes a different way to frame the question of what is enough.
“I Don’t Know” approaches love as a mathematical proof that fails on purpose. Fermat’s margin, primes and irrational constants cannot settle what the narrator feels. The song lets that failure lead towards a simpler admission. Elsewhere, “Market Square” attends to a working English market, while “The Letter” uses an unopened envelope to hold uncertainty in place.
Folk, soul, indie and post-punk remain part of Jeremy’s musical vocabulary, with the lyric kept at the centre. Side Three gives large questions the scale of a short song, allowing an ordinary scene to carry a difficult thought without closing it down.
Body photo: Salome Rose
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