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Fire and White Hot singles are out everywhere.
Hand in Hand got a live for the NPR Tiny Desk Contest.
And the first album review is out from Midlands Rocks.
There's a slice of majesty in ‘Fire’ -- a window into the world of a Boise trabadour and the opening song on ‘Next’s Town Trees’. Yep, it is that good and it may just be the start of your love affair for this brilliant artist.
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‘Next Town’s Trees’ is an 8 track album by Boise indie-folk musician, Jesse Blake Rundle, produced with bandmate and engineer, Nate Agenbroad.
“I wrote these songs during a time of immense change in my life: I was finally leaving the church, uncovering my sexuality, starting my first relationship with a man, figuring out joy in sobriety, and settling into my life as a musician,” he says. Jesse explores themes of modern identity and self discovery with a poet’s eye for detail. His acute observations are capable of catharsis and comfort during dark times.
My second album, Next Town’s Trees, is finally ready for the world. I’m gonna say a lot more about it in the coming months. And everyone can hear it on March 3, 2023. There will be vinyl and cds and all that.
Here’s a new track about cantaloupe, bike, rides, and grinning in the sun.
I made it July while the sun was shining and there was brief relief from some of the 2020 blues.
First, this review from J.R.R. Kinsey is just really great. It’s always a joy to hear that someone experienced something how you really intended it.
https://jrrkinsey.com/2020/04/24/review-of-jesse-blake-rundles-new-album-radishes-and-flowers/
“Rundle carries the poem’s plea with an unfaltering voice and music that feels reverent. It made me cry.”
This song makes me cry too, and that’s why it’s last.
In March as the Covid-19 death counts just kept rising in the US and around the world, the numbers were getting to the point that they were hard to comprehend. Hard to connect to any individual people. The media also shifted story from the virus to the politics that circled it. Just another news cycle.
At the same time, I had thousands of dandelions growing in my backyard. I awoke one morning thinking of the callous the political responses, and how disconnected those actions and words are from the people they impact.
It’s almost exactly 3 years from when I bought a 1960s Sears & Roebuck parlor guitar, detuned it, and started singing poems from Wallace Stevens’ Harmonium over what I was strumming. It took me a while to figure out to shape them into something that felt true to the poems but also worked as a standalone piece of music.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
I made a video for this song The Emperor of Ice-Cream, which is adapted from the Wallace Stevens poem.
In the parking lot at my day job, an ice cream truck is always parked. And, oddly enough, a hearse visits the office every afternoon to deliver mail. While out to pick up lunch, I kept encountering this hearse driving down the road but with no driver in the driver seat. Surreal, right? Well, the mailwoman is short, and like any good postal worker she delivered mail from the passenger seat.
About a year ago when I wrote this song I got the image stuck in my mind of a car chase between an ice cream truck and a hearse. The poem the song is based on, by Wallace Stevens, circles around the story of a wake for an old woman and her house filled with what seem like carousers at a party. There's both life and death mixed in throughout. Somehow this image arose.
“both whimsical creeps along the small details of our world and grand swells of emotion, achieving a balance between macro and micro that makes for a striking and beautiful sound.”
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