Damien Jurado's World

Listening to Damien Jurado is a journey into the heart of all that's right and wrong in the world, mostly what is wrong. Jurado’s literary style and narratives follow lost loves, perplexed figures, musings on various facets of life’s mundane nature and gross brutalities. He is to songwriting what Flannery O’Connor is to the short story and what the Coen brothers are to film. They all deal in absurd characters, contrast good and evil, acknowledge the human struggle and press toward redemption amidst the darkness. Jurado fills his quiet songs with characters and stories and unfoldings that smack of stark reality, a reality often difficult to hear. His songs place you on the wrong side of the tracks, and into the heart of life’s toughest relational struggles. He takes the listener to the reality of the human condition, for better and for worse.

White Center Damien Jurado, from On My Way to Absence

Heard they shot another

No one knows the reason

It didn't make the papers

It's just another wild night

Here in white center

Tonight they gather flowers

Sunday pack the churches

Morning comes too slowly

For us who feel like victims

Here in white center

Turn off your headlights

Here comes a cop car

Music for the bad boys

Music for the good boys

Here in white center

And this is what I appreciate about Jurado’s craft and art form. In presenting the world as it is, he forces the listener to distinguish from light and shadow, between myth and reality, between truth and lie. We see truth through the moral failings of the characters in his songs and see the desperate longing for hope in a fractured, sinful world.

Jurado’s newest album, Caught in the Trees, will release on September 9, 2008.