JP Harris: Avant-Country from Nashville, TN

JP Harris was born shortly, and fortunately, a few minutes before Valentine’s Day 1983 in Montgomery, Alabama. Within a handful of years he was wearing a green velour tracksuit and leading a large Doberman around for street credibility, at the young age of three. He had a charm and strut that would take him far, so the grown folks said; but roughly a decade later, on the opposite side of the country, he would leave his family’s home late one summer night with no designs on fame, fortune, or clothing endorsements, never to return. 

  He had an inkling that the eighth grade was enough education for where he was headed,and set a course for Anywhere, USA. Turns out he was right.

  Spending most of his teenage years traveling by freight train, thumb, or foot, he would set down his rucksack for what he thought was the last time in rural northern New England, shortly after the anticlimactic event known as Y2K came to pass without much to-do. He spent the next decade living in remote cabins lacking the modern appointments of power, running water, or winter road access. 

  It was there Harris honed the many trades he’d learned: sheepherder, logger, heavy equipment operator, farm laborer, restoration carpenter, and sometimes as contraband handler, while his musical palette expanded beyond the punk rock of his youth to include the Early American Folk Canon of blues, old time, and early country recordings.

  JP had long fashioned himself a carpenter who did halfway-decent campfire renditions of old country tunes, but turned suddenly to songwriting in his mid twenties after years without the slightest ambition toward “music business” of any sort. He would assemble a band, trade his work truck for an old Econoline van, and fifteen years would elapse before he would reluctantly add the term “professional” in front of his title of “musician.”

In 2011, Harris loaded his van and trailer with every tool, guitar, and keepsake he could cram and moved to Nashville TN, shortly before the release of his debut album “I’ll Keep Calling,” which would win him countless accolades from various outlets and entities unheard of by the general masses. It was enough praise to keep him on the road, even if his largest reward garnered at the time was a sizable box of Taco Bell gift cards.

He would go on to record 2014’s “Home Is Where The Hurt Is,” 2018’s “Sometimes Dogs Bark At Nothing,” and 2021’s Appalachian banjo-centric side project album “Don’t You Marry No Railroad Man,” under the moniker JP Harris’ Dreadful Wind & Rain.

JP’s historic restoration carpentry has continued to be a baseline for his relationship to music; the yin to his yang, the Burt to his Ernie, the Dolly to his Porter. It was through this concurrent line of work that he met another twice-initialed singer with a penchant for old Americana music, obscure film, and overly elaborate ethnic meal preparations: one JD McPherson. The two became fast friends and would eventually, through many twists, turns, false starts, and biblically-proportionate plagues, enter a modest studio in Nashville to record Harris’ latest album “JP Harris Is A Trash Fire.”

 Over the course of nine months in 2023, they recorded a sometimes lush, sometimes sparse, and sometimes jarring country album of Harris’ originals, loudly and violently squelching any attempt to pigeon-hole a song into any subgenre of country music. Only albums by Lee Hazelwood and an obscure folk album Waylon Jennings made when his hair was still short were allowed to be mentioned in reference. Featuring the guest vocals of Erin Rae, The Watson Twins, Shovels & Rope, and producer JD McPherson himself, the record is equal parts satire, reflection, and apology to those that would listen. 

 In a musical landscape of period-correct reproduction, “outlaw” internet posturing, and flavor-of-the-month variants on country, “JP Harris Is A Trash Fire” burns bright as a dumpster ablaze in a Walmart parking lot on a moonless night; some will fear it, some will gravitate to its acrid warmth, and most will have no idea what to make of the situation. 

  Harris has been steadily elbowing the definitive boundaries of “country music” wider with every album, both sonically and lyrically, and his latest piece of self described “Avant-Country” is no exception. Even within the rapidly growing world of “underground” country music, Harris still considers himself an outsider, content to inhabit a gray area where punk rock ethos, folk art aesthetic, and the workingman’s ballad mingle. 

  When he’s not touring, JP Harris can be found fixing historic houses, riding old motorcycles, or picking through scrap piles for useable refuse.

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