Music burns as the guiding light through the nights of doubt and sorrow. Faithful to the last flicker, Jeffrey Martin, a true emissary of heartrending songs, may be found standing clear before us through the darkness.
Indeed, for the past ten years, Martin, a former school teacher, has mixed penetrating truth with compelling heartbreak, using song to soothe himself and, in essence, to medicate bad feelings, his own, as well as ours. Martin doesn’t just sing a song; he unearths its pain, his songwriting exhilarating in its honesty and grief, constantly storming forward like a tempest.
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Journey of the Right Words
The song “Sculptor” from Jeffrey Martin’s most recent recording, Thank God We Left the Garden (2023), is a worthy instance of his ability to hit the mark with a firm economy of language.
“‘Sculptor’ is a response to the ever increasing pace of things, all the noise and crushing pressure of stuff, technology, AI,” said Martin. “I spend a lot of time alone on tour, and it’s easy to feel unmoored in the world and get stuck in my head. I have some good friends I exchange letters with, and the letters are an antidote to that stuff. There is something grounding about letters.” Indeed, “Sculptor” exemplifies Martin’s ability to transform a solitary line into a singular moment: “But you wrote a letter like a sculpture / And I cried and let the day go.”
“Those lines tumbled out onto the page,” said Martin. “It painted a small scene that I could get back to again and again, and it stayed true. Some lines are geared to story and imagery in that way. I could have explained it with all sorts of other words and used many more words. But that would have made it more accurate, but less true.”
Jeffrey Martin was recently on tour in Ireland. He said he fully appreciated the reception of his songs and the genuine candor and raw comfort of the frolicking, unselfconscious folks he met in the taverns there.
“There is no such thing as a sad enough song in Ireland, so it’s a good fit,” said Martin. “In Ireland, they keep the hard stuff of life at the forefront. They don’t hide from death or sadness, but speak somehow joyfully about it. A funeral is made into a joyful celebration of someone’s life, instead of something somber. Shows feel that way, too. Hard things in life we all go through, but let us find some joy in that collective experience. There is a reverence for words embedded in the DNA over there.”
The journey of finding the right words goes beyond necessity for Martin, who taught English at the high-school level in the Portland area for about five years. It is alchemy. It is a quest. While it is easy to speak of a musician’s influences in solely musical terms, songwriters of Martin’s intensity cast a wider perimeter, understanding music as an osmosis of culture, literature, poetry (listen to “Billy Burroughs”), and other tenets of learning.
“I was shamefully late coming to an appreciation of books and poetry,” said Martin. “I denied or resisted it in high school. Out of high school, I fell in love with it. I’ve been going back to some Raymond Carver. The amount of life he fits in a short story, you could pick one story and chew on it for a couple of days. I’ve been trying to figure out how to say more with fewer words, and he’s a master of that.”
Unstuck Mind
Like other creative sorts, Jeffrey Martin can get stuck in his inner discourse, the rattling speech of his mind, and sometimes that self-preoccupation could be hard to shake.
“The biggest help for me when I get stuck (in my own head) or it is not coming is to remember that the songwriting part is separate from living life,” said Martin. “Songwriting is only a reflection of living life. When I’m stuck, I can forget to live life. When I finally remember that piece, I do things like going to meet a good friend, calling my dad, taking a walk, or having lunch with somebody. I do something out of my head, which always unlocks something for me. Doing something instead of living in my head is the best way for me to write.”
Martin said that he finds the revision process of writing a song difficult, a rigorous exercise in the discipline of keeping at it. From start to finish, however, instinct slyly guides the process.
“There is a gut feeling when a prominent line in the song or chorus comes true,” said Martin. “You sing it, and you are brought back to some notion of the heart of that song or the sentiment in that line. There are other times when lines fit well, but you are leaning too much on a trope, a world of things said and done so many times before. You realize that words have been used that way before, and that saps energy away from the specifics of that story or song.”
Sometimes, a song just needs enough breathing room to flourish, and sometimes, the sparsest songwriting induces one to fill in the voids with whatever thoughts or feelings are specific to one’s own life at that moment. These are some things that Martin, a relative late bloomer, is learning along the way.
Following high school, Martin worked for a couple of years in construction and building houses before deciding that he was interested in teaching. When he was in his early 20s, a musician friend forced him out of his interior hiding space and encouraged him to perform his own songs publicly.
While living in Eugene, Oregon, he played at an open mic event outside the city, and his first response was ambivalence: he hated being in front of others, but loved it, too. It’s a strangely divergent psychology that he is still struggling with. Soon, music competed with his ability to be fully present in the classroom.
“I was encouraging all of my students to do the thing that they were most interested in,” said Martin, “to do it honestly, work hard, and trust that enough money and stability would follow from that. I realized that at some point I needed to take my own advice. I had to throw all in with teaching or throw all in with music. In 2015, I decided to stop teaching and have been touring ever since.”
Vulnerable Poetic Appeal
It has been a path wisely chosen for Jeffrey Martin, though the occupational switch has not been seamless. Singer-songwriters such as Martin usually don’t have one single song that explodes in popularity, or that tops charts grandly; they methodically gain their credibility vulnerable sound by vulnerable sound, darkened bar by darkened bar, unknown town by unknown town.
Martin’s appeal has grown steadily among those who see in his work a type of rare poetic freedom that tempts listeners to shed a burden that they have been carrying for a long time. People enamored of stories of those who have fallen in love and can think of nothing else but their beloved; enamored of stories that are generous and considerate and perhaps even emotionally jarring.
“The people coming to shows are real people, real loyal listeners,” said Martin. “That can be heartening for what can be a strangely anonymous and lonely experience on the road. I tour a lot alone, and it can get pretty strange in my mind, especially at the two or three week mark, so there is something grounding about playing shows, and night after night, finding people wanting to have a human exchange.”
