There are so many songs about drinking. There are probably nearly as many about giving up. But there aren’t all that many songs about one modern situation: your lover’s new-found sobriety, and where that leaves you. A drinker? Supportive? In denial? Or, as Henry Jamison, an insightful Vermont singer-songwriter, puts it elliptically on a song called Dallas Love Field: “Black as the kettle’s the hypocrite pot/ Often than more, more often than not.”
Jamison is a prematurely bearded, bespectacled twentysomething who is just one EP old. His debut album, The Wilds, is that rare thing: an unshowy, literate gem that sounds a little like a lot of people – Sufjan Stevens, Bon Iver, Leonard Cohen – but carves out a niche all its own. The Jacket multiplies Cohen by Stevens, finding passion refracted in everyday things – the air con of the grocery aisle, the light coming off flatscreen TVs. The Wilds are both the wilds of New England and the darkness inside. His songs take place in baseball fields and in the abstract expressionist rooms of museums.
Jamison is also a very unlikely Spotify star. Real Peach, the catchy, intellectual centrepiece of this album, came out on The Rains EP (2016) and became something of a runaway success on the platform: 20m streams and counting. Normally you look to Spotify for the next R&B siren, but it looks like it now breaks troubadours too – even writerly types who sprinkle words like “elegiac” and “the fallacy of form” into a song about how his “baby is a real peach”. Jamison, it turns out, is descended from the 14th-century poet John Gower – a contemporary of Chaucer – and the US civil war-era songwriter George Frederick Root. But he is a resolutely modern operator.
The song Sunlit Juice was directly inspired by Jamison’s girlfriend’s sobriety. He, meanwhile, is still “sippin’ on the sunlit juice”. It’s a tune that goes down easy – a few banjo notes here, but the kind of rhythmic delivery there that hints that Jamison is working in the 21st century; there are subtle electronics at play throughout.
Another song, Through a Glass, Jamison describes as “an ode to delirium” – a bitter one that bends a vision of a lover through the prism of a bottle. Even worse, he’s losing her to “a six-five ex-Marine”. Dallas Love Field, meanwhile, introduces a pair of lovers – maybe the same ones, maybe not.
“When we met we were two bright-eyed alcoholics,” sings Jamison, “In the springtime in the Year of Our Lord/ As we glanced the gilded edges of our identities.” They would ride their bikes to the dive bar at the edge of town, he reveals. But what will they do now? If The Wilds doesn’t quite answer that question, it is unflinching in examining, time and again, who we are to each other.
