Austin, TX: “only dead for a little while” out November 10 on New West subsidiary Strolling Bones Records
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. only dead for a little while, out November 10 on New West subsidiary Strolling Bones Records, brings Jon Dee back full circle 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. Of the title, detailing his 2019 near death experience, he quips, “it wasn’t a near-death experience, it was death death.”
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 withinonly 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.
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.