Jeremy works out of a home studio in Banbury and records under the name Music by Jeremy, and the whole project rests on fairly classic songwriting foundations, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Randy Newman, and David Bowie all turn up somewhere in the DNA. He’s a multi-instrumentalist handling most of it himself, guitar and fretless bass included, and he runs the operation entirely independently.
The album has an unusual origin. The songs were originally written for a collaboration that never actually came together. Rather than shelving them, Jeremy eventually concluded that if anyone was going to record them, it would have to be him, so he assembled the whole band himself, in a manner of speaking.
Scenes from a Well Worn Path – Side One
The scale is worth stating plainly. “A Well Worn Path” is a 24-track double album arriving in four separate instalments between August and November, and this is the first of them, out August 25th. Across the full project, the writing travels through acoustic folk, soul, post punk, synth pop, blues, and gospel, and what keeps that from flying apart is the lyric writing, which stays recognisably his no matter which genre a given song lands in.
“Be Me” opens the record and serves as lead single, a driving indie pop song about the toll of constantly shape-shifting to meet other people’s expectations of you. What sells it is the plainness of the writing, he states the idea rather than decorating it, and it hits harder for that.
“The Story of a Mistress” shifts into character-driven storytelling and features some of the strongest guitar work on the side. This is where the Dylan and Randy Newman influence is most audible, particularly in how comfortable Jeremy is letting someone be morally messy without stepping in to pass sentence on them. “Bowie on the Wall” could easily have tipped into pastiche, but it steers clear of doing a straight impression. What it borrows from Bowie isn’t a sound so much as a license, proof that you’re not obligated to stay the same person twice in a row. “How to Be Good” keeps the record’s central preoccupations running through the middle stretch.
The title track brings the biggest production on the side and steers everything back toward the record’s emotional core. There’s real fondness in it that never curdles into sentimentality, and hearing Jeremy’s own playing carry the arrangement gives it a homemade texture that suits the material. “Bittersweet” closes the side out. Jeremy has described his own outlook as “joyous realism,” and by this point in the running order you can hear exactly what he means, plenty goes wrong, plenty is genuinely ridiculous, and none of that is treated as a good enough excuse to pack it in.
One thing worth addressing head-on: Jeremy used generative technology trained on his own voice to fill out a band he had no way of hiring. Everything at the foundation is his, the songs, the playing, the experiences the lyrics come from, with the technology stepping in at the arrangement stage rather than at the point where the idea gets made. Whether that sits comfortably will vary listener to listener, but it’s a distinction he’s been upfront about rather than quiet on.
Final Thoughts
“Scenes from a Well Worn Path – Side One” is sprawling and genuinely ambitious, clearly the work of somebody who’s had these songs stacked up for a long while and finally found a way to get them recorded. Three more sides still to come.
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