Austin, TX: Texas Troubadour’s new video tells the story behind his new album “Only Dead For a Little While”
It’s been seven years since we’ve gotten a new album from Jon Dee Graham. The 5th generation Texan’s artistry and accomplishments are well-known throughout his home state and the music community beyond, as a seminal figure in Texas punk and Americana (The Skunks and True Believers), as a hotshot guitarist for other artists, as an explosive performer whose club sets leave no prisoners, and as a singer-songwriter whose range extends from a whisper to a howl. Today, Jon Dee is releasing “see you by the fire,” the first single from his new album “Only Dead For a Little While”, out November 10 on New West subsidiary Strolling Bones Records. It’s a full-circle album that brings Jon Dee back to the New West family, where the three albums he released after the turn of the century helped launch him as a solo artist.
Watch the video — The Strolling Bones Chronicles: Jon Dee Graham
Of the title, detailing his 2019 experience, he quips, “it wasn’t a near-death experience, it was death death.” He’s also sharing an animated video by musician Chuck Prophet and Lauren Tabak that tells the story of “the day I died,” and his dream of an afterlife where old friends meet around a campfire. Jon Dee explains, “For decades now, I see people from my tribe — already long dead — in public. LET ME BE CLEAR: I KNOW it’s not them…wish-fulfillment, or pareidolia*, or magic… it’s my brain. Doing what it wants. But I like the idea that we will all see each other by the fire one day.” * Note from JD: “‘Pareidolia’ means when the brain takes a random shape or a stain on a ceiling or such and ‘makes up its own version’. Like when people see Jesus on a tortilla.”
“see you by the fire” premiered at Glide Magazine, which wrote: “In typical Jon Dee fashion, the song is the kind of straightforward rocker that feels hard to come by these days. Lyrically, he captures the moment when he reaches life after death and turns it into a a campfire singalong. With Jon Dee’s signature gritty vocals leading the charge, the tune manages to be both catchy and rocking in a Neil Young sort of fashion. Tying it all together is the dreamy guitar flourishes that add a sentimental, ethereal quality to the tune.”
Only Dead for a Little While is the album an artist makes when he has nothing left to prove, nothing to lose, nothing to hide. Think of Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, but sharpen the blade and crank the volume. You might even think of Frank Sinatra’s September of My Years, though Jon Dee Graham is a very different sort of saloon singer. There’s a certain darkness, bittersweet, whenever you stare mortality in the face. And especially when that face is the one you see in the mirror. But there’s also the richness of being alive and in love and open to it all. And that’s where the magic lies. “I want to do real magic in my songs,” says Graham. “I mean, I can do sleight of hand with the best of them, and, you know, alliteration, and make the words line up and dance. But I want to be one of those people who actually make the woman disappear. In this song, it’s like, hey, you know those people who are gone? They’re not really gone. Because way up ahead I see that glow. And we’ll all meet each other by the fire.”
Such magic abounds within Only Dead For a Little While. There’s the entire history of humankind’s fall from grace in “Where It All Went Wrong,” a take-no-prisoners blitzkrieg through centuries of perdition. The majestic “Lost in the Flood” has an equally Biblical sweep. And there’s “ Lazarus,” which challenges mortality and wins, at least this round, paying homage to Warren Zevon and “Papa” Hemingway in the process. The album also breathes new life into “Death Ain’t Got No Mercy,” the rawest, starkest rendition of the Rev. Gary Davis classic you could conjure. Two other songs from within the family hit even closer to home: “ Astronaut” peers at the earth from a great distance, from a point of no return, from a realization that “we can never go back,” as the haunting refrain reminds. Like has something has changed, irrevocably and irretrievably. The spoken-word revery of “Brave As Her ” hits even harder, sounding like an almost whispered confession from the deepest part of the soul. The result is a full-force triumph that reflects the seismic challenges we’ve been through—the pandemic or all of us, financial and medical and psychological issues for some of us, a return from the dead for it least one of us—and reassures that everything will somehow work out.