In today’s ever-expanding artistic landscape, which often feels dominated by social media and the vast excesses of content constantly being piled atop the internet, it can sometimes feel impossible to find the real stuff. Layers and layers of boundless irony seem to have folded our collective artistic culture in on itself, leaving us in a world where to be earnest is to be cringe… or so it seems the masses often rule.
And with songwriters specifically, it can feel like most everyone out there today is either taking themselves way too seriously, or maybe not seriously enough?
Amidst all that confusion, standing out from the crowd is Jacob Jeffries, a songwriter and singer who excels at holding the sincerity and the irony of it all so refreshingly in balance. On his album You Got The Right Idea, recorded deep in the woods of Michigan with producer Theo Katzman, Jeffries delivers a proper tour de force of song-craft, with a voice that feels both new and old, as so many great voices do.
Speaking with Leo Sidran for The Third Story podcast, Jeffries covered learning to talk by way of The Beatles, the joy of decoding gibberish into song, and the symbiosis of funny and sad in music and everyday life.
“I think I grew up wanting to be a Beatle,” Jeffries says, earnestly. “The religion in my house was far more Beatles than it was Jewish. My mom was peppering us with Beatles music… trivia… it’s how I learned to talk! I was actually listening back to some of my record, and I was like ‘...why am I saying this word this way?’” Jeffries muses. “‘...Why am I singing it like that?’ And it’s like - that’s how John would sing it.”
While much of the album is made up of meticulously crafted Beatlesque retro-pop, Jeffries wisely left ample room for spontaneity in the recording process.
“Chickerondale was one night with a bottle of red wine,” Jeffries recalls with a smile. “I kept saying ‘Chickeron… ChickeronDALE…’ And we didn’t know - is it Chickerondale? Is it Chicker-ON-Dale-street? What is this? And we were like… it doesn’t matter!” Jeffries chuckles. “And we wrote a song one night, and at the very end of the week, we were like ‘...should we track that song, Chickerondale?’ And someone said - it’s a shame if we don’t! And we did it all around one mic, and it was just such a fun thing,” Jeffries laughs.
“What made the record-making process at Theo’s ranch so unique was the untethering. You’re not asking ‘what do you guys want for dinner? …oh sorry, I gotta break early, I have a date down the street…’ Jeffries says nostalgically.
“You’re in 40 acres of wilderness. You’re not going anywhere. You’re working on this record until dinner, and then we’re hanging out. It’s the most beautiful way I’ve ever had the privilege of making anything. It’s a beautiful thing”
Listen to the full conversation here via The Third Story, and find You Got The Right Idea anywhere you get music
The first song in this radio piece appears courtesy of Bergen Street Studios:
