Stream: Joel Jerome, ‘We Made It Home’
Kevin Bronson on
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Joel Jerome has done a lot. He’s released a slew of solo albums and singles, either under his own name or under guises such as Babies on Acid. He’s played Coachella (2004, with Dios, the band he co-founded with his brother in his native Hawthorne). He’s covered Beck. He’s put his own spin on “Sgt. Pepper’s.” He’s started his own imprint, Psychedelic Thriftstore (“Psychedelic Thriftstore Folk” was technically his first solo album), and in a production/engineering/collaborative capacity he worked with the likes of Cherry Glazerr, La Sera, Tashaki Miyaki, Happy Hollows and L.A. Witch. He’s become known as “Papa Joel” in the indie, though he prefers “Brother Joel.”
Even in the most barebones environment, magic can happen when Jerome is in front of a microphone, guitar in hand, channeling the beauty and fragility of life in his songs.
His latest music, dusted by the precise production of Rob Schnapf, lets that quality shine. Today, Jerome unveiled the new single “We Made It Home,” which arrived with the news that a new album, “Super Flower Blood Moon,” will be out May 13 via Dangerbird Records. The song asks uncomfortable questions (like “Do we all end up alone?”), but in the end hopefully decides, “No regrets, no remorse, ’cause we made it home.” It is not for nothing that in Minh Pham’s lyric video, the song appears as if out of the ether on AM radio.
Jerome’s new album — with nods to artists such as Beach Boys, Guided by Voices, Angel Olsen and Fleet Foxes, as well as paying homage to the music of his parents (Latin artists like Roberto Carlos, Nelson Ned and Juan Gabriel) — grows out of his first release last fall with Dangerbird. As part of the L.A. label’s Microdose series, he released the single “When You Land.”
||| Stream: “We Made It Home”
||| Also: Stream “When You Land”
||| Previously: “There’s Nothing Here to Bother You Anymore,” “Sgt. Papa’s,” “Everybody Wants Somebody,” “Psychedelic Thriftstore Folk,” “When Beck Was Cool”
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