Florist Edition (Ltd to 150)
As the Louisville, Kentucky noise rock trio Young Widows scaled back their activity, guitarist/vocalist Evan Patterson created an ever-evolving solo project under the moniker of Jaye Jayle that explored the more abstract realms of the American singer-songwriter process. The name had two meanings. First and foremost, it conjured the image of a bluebird locked in a cage. For Patterson, that image translated into being trapped with the blues and mired in depression. But the name was also an homage to J.J. Cale, the Tulsa sound originator best known for his song “After Midnight.” Fittingly, Jaye Jayle’s music is best suited for those after midnight hours, when the house lights are dim, the air is thick with humidity and tobacco smoke, perceptions are chemically altered, and every note carries far more gravity. On his latest album, Don’t Let Your Love Life Let You Down, Patterson continues to mine his unique strain of the meditative blues while finally breaking the shackles of defeat and passing into a realm residing between Western stoicism and mystic wonder.
To understand how Jaye Jayle arrived at the way station of Don’t Let Your Love Life Let You Down, you must first trace the trail back to the project’s modest beginnings. The earliest Jaye Jayle releases were four 45s housed in dust jackets—the kind of relics you would expect to find shoved in the shoeboxes and milk crates at the back of vintage record stores. Etched into their grooves you’d find a sparse and cryptic spin on American roots music. Across the first two Jaye Jayle albums—House Cricks and Other Excuses to Get Out (2016) and No Trail and Other Unholy Paths (2018)—Patterson expanded the parameters of his sound. If you listened closely, you could hear the echoes of Louisville in the songs. There was the tension and dynamics of Slint, the hushed songwriting of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, and the repetitious minimalism of The Shipping News, yet it somehow didn’t seem tethered to any clear tradition. The big sea change came with Prisyn (2020). Over the course of an eleven-week tour, Patterson slowly constructed songs in GarageBand on his phone as a distraction from the mundane day-to-day schedule of life on the road. A portmanteau of prison and synthetic, Prisyn was a deliberate departure from his previous work’s organic nature and an embrace of the personal isolation that set in with the pandemic.
