Jeffrey Martin w/ Bob Sumner

Jeffrey Martin w/ Bob Sumner

Thurs 3/6

6pm doors/7pm show

All Ages | $20 adv./$23 day of

On a small corner lot in southeast Portland, Oregon, Jeffrey Martin holed up through the winter recording his quietly potent new album Thank God We Left The Garden. Long nights bled into mornings in the tiny shack he built in the backyard, eight feet by ten feet. What began as demos meant for a later visit to a proper studio became the album itself, spare and intimate and true. Recorded live and alone around two microphones, Jeffrey often held his breath to wait for the low diesel hum of a truck to pass one block over on the busy thoroughfare. During the coldest nights, he timed recording between the clicks of the oil coil heater cycling on and off.

Martin's fourth full length album, Thank God We Left The Garden comes out on Portland's beloved Fluff and Gravy Records Nov __. He produced and engineered it himself, recalling, "There was a magic quality to the sounds I was getting in the shack with these two cheap microphones, some lucky recipe of time and place that allowed my voice and the way I play guitar and the shape of these new songs to come together with the kind of honesty I was craving."

The sounds feel warm, close, and refreshingly real, all held up by the richness and rare candor of Jeffrey's voice. Production is restrained mostly to his guitar and vocals, with flashes of classical guitar for a tumbling wash of melody and low end color. Martin's voice sits high above everything, reaching into new melodic territory that goes beyond his earlier work. "I feel like I've only just learned how to sing," Martin said. "Like I've been chasing this record since my very first recordings. I wanted to really see what I could do, just my guitar and my voice and little else. I don't think it was conscious. I think maybe it was a reaction to the pace of life these days. The churning news and entertainment and politics and violence of it all. I needed to know that even in this day and age, just a few simple ingredients still hold up."

Whether singing about his own internal landscape, telling a story of someone else's, or reflecting on the elusive relationship between scarcity and contentment, Martin's writing never pushes the listener away, never points a finger. He sings of things we can all pin a memory on, holding the rough shorn gem of human experience up to the light.

Talking about traditional music—country, Americana, folk—gets a little sticky for Bob Sumner. His problem isn’t with the music itself, of course; one spin through his forthcoming sophomore album will assure you that the Canadian singer-songwriter can appreciate the finer points of steel guitar, fiddle, and strong storytelling. Rather, Sumner takes issue with the idea that the only way to honor the genre’s greats is to play music exactly the way they did. On Some Place to Rest Easy, you’ll hear countrypolitan strings alongside ambient sensibilities; tasteful synth tracks followed seamlessly by numbers with dobro and steel guitar. The result is an album that takes as much inspiration from the audio production of Randy Travis as it does the lyrical soul of Big Thief’s Adrienne Lenker—a melding of eras, sounds, concepts, and stylings that’s informed by the past, but never bound by it.

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