The record industry is dying, and that’s fine with me. It’s most important function, aside from distribution, is content selection. Record label A&R (artists and repertoire) acts as a giant content filter, which has its good points (you don’t personally have to listen to 1,000 lousy songs before hearing a good one) and its bad points (commercial radio stations play the same 50 songs on repeat forever).
The Internet enables artists to distribute their music at minimal cost, which leaves it to us, not the record companies, to filter down all the music to just the music we like. Aggregators, such as Last.FM and Pandora, allow us to harness the wisdom of crowds (i.e., people with more time us) to do a lot of this filtering for us. This review represents me doing my part in all this. I was given an album that’s a little outside my ordinary musical tastes, asked to listen to it, and ended up really enjoying it. The album in question is Jonah Knight’s “Ghosts Don’t Disappear”.
Ghosts Don't Disappear
Jonah Sea Knight, a singer/songwriter (ahem, “songfighter”) and erstwhile professional playwright from Frederick, Maryland, is an artist I encountered when searching for a playwriting podcast early last year. His podcast, “Theatrically Speaking”, which ran back in 2007, was wonderfully informative. He moved away from playwriting recently and went back to work as a musician. He writes songs about being haunted, and peppers them with lyrics covering well-trodden but still fertile thematic ground: love and loss, time and distance, and the physical and metaphysical distance between us.
“Ghosts Don’t Disappear” is his second EP, and exemplifies, according to Knight, the creative direction he is going in. “Ghosts” offers introspective coffeehouse music with an added layer of word-craft, imagery, and narrative. The warm production highlights the delicately finger-picked guitar lines, theremin-like keyboards, and accordion. Knight’s sometimes whispered, sometimes sung lyrics
Three of these songs—“Someday We’ll All Be Ghosts,” “Far,” and “Rhythm”—are duets. Not to take anything away from Knight, but his female backgrounds singer, Jennie Williams and (especially) Kristin Lagana, are outstanding. The interplay of the male and female vocals make these the strongest tracks on the EP. “Rhythm” shines especially brightly, and is my favorite track of the bunch.
I recommend that you check out Jonah Knight’s music. You can It took me a couple listens to get my ears around it, but now I really enjoy it, and eagerly await his next release.
Jonah Knight has a website and a mailing list. If you sign up, you get 6 free songs. His next EP will be out this fall.
