Kevin Bronson on September 13th, 2019

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Portland native Jordan Beckett debuted his solo work as Bootstraps back in 2012, at first self-releasing a self-titled album before a major label came calling and re-released it widely in early 2014. Bootstraps’ shimmering and emotive folk-pop songs were a natural progression of the songwriting he was doing for film and television, not to mention influenced by Northwest luminaries such as Elliott Smith, Death Cab For Cutie and Modest Mouse.

Beckett has had some ups and downs since that auspicious debut — but he released a covers album, “Homage” and the 2017 EP “To Each His Own” while balancing work as a producer and singer for film.

Today, Bootstraps returned with the new single “Evergreen,” an astral but oh-so-lovelorn meditation on the seemingly futile pursuit of stability.

“‘Evergreen’ is about feeling transient,” Beckett told Variance, where the song premiered. “The world I was seeing in L.A. and my own life was like a TV eternally switching channels, riding out waves of relationships that were here and gone too soon. False starts, ‘a wild horse on a leash,’ but still believing in the existence of permanence and finding something constant; evergreen as it were. This kind of dualism, reality vs. optimism creates a certain conflict I like in my music.”

It’s the first single from Bootstraps’ third album “Demo Love,” out Oct. 18. It’s not a collection of demos but instead a play on the word “demo,” which can mean to demonstrate or to demolish. That duality plays out throughout the album, which was made in collaboration with David Quon (ex-We Barbarians) and Gavin McDonald, each credited as co-writers on the new song.

Here, Bootstraps achingly longs for that moment in a photo booth to be more than just a faded memory. We all have photographs like that.

||| Stream: “Evergreen”