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| Featured Artist Link REALLYMUSICRADIO presentsJESSE HARRIS
On their new Verve Forecast album While the Music Lasts, Jesse Harris and the Ferdinandos deliver the same nuanced, introspective songwriting and compellingly bittersweet musical sensibility that are already well known to listeners who discovered the foursome's widely acclaimed 2003 Verve release The Secret Sun or their three prior indie CDs-and to the millions who were introduced to Harris' talents via his work with longtime friend and collaborator Norah Jones. The New York-bred troubadour played guitar and wrote five songs for Jones' multi-platinum breakthrough album Come Away with Me-including the massive hit "Don't Know Why," for which Harris won a Grammy award for Song of the Year.
2003 saw Harris receiving his share of the spotlight, touring extensively with the Ferdinandos and receiving widespread acclaim for his distinctive songcraft. The Los Angeles Times described him as "a skilled guitarist and a writer with a gift for poetically sculpted sketches of romantic yearning," while the Philadelphia Inquirer noted that Harris' "ability to give universal feelings a musical and emotional print... distinguishes the songs from zillions with similar themes." Interview, meanwhile, praised The Secret Sun as "charming, sad, soft-spoken, and utterly devoid of any of the larger-than-life pretense that mars so much pop music." "All of our albums have been pretty sparse," Harris notes. "But on this one, we wanted a richer, more sophisticated sound, so we added things like strings and horns and piano and organ and marimba. I think the idea was to have them pretty subdued in the mix-to have all that stuff in there but still give it a little mystery. Terry Manning was an incredible guy to work with, and he had a lot to do with the sound and vibe of the record. The whole album was recorded and mixed analog. We tended to go for darker tones-French horn, viola, cello, clarinet. I think that that attitude extended to the songwriting. On The Secret Sun, I was striving to write super-simple tunes for the most part, but on this one I wanted stuff that was a little richer harmonically." Jesse Harris has been making distinctive, personally charged music for most of his life. Growing up in an artistic Manhattan family, he began studying classical piano at the age of ten, before picking up guitar and harmonica in his teens. Although he'd initially wanted to write prose rather than music, his discovery of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wonder and The Band opened his eyes to music's capacity to communicate. He began writing his own songs and playing them in front of club audiences at 17, and eventually won his first record deal as half of the duo Once Blue. Once Blue released a critically acclaimed debut on EMI in 1995, but the group's second album went unreleased due to record-company politics. "The last couple of years have proved to me that this is the thing that I really want to do," the artist concludes. "Because of everything that happened with Norah, I could have just spent the past year co-writing with people. But I just don't enjoy that kind of thing very much. I have the most fun making music and working with the band, and if given the choice that's how I want to spend my time. I only started singing because somebody had to sing these songs, and being a frontman still feels kind of weird and strange to me. But at this point I don't think I could really do anything else. I feel a certain responsibility to these songs, because if I don't sing them, no one else will." |
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