A few years ago, Jeffrey Martin made a last-minute decision to record one of his concerts with the intention of possibly turning it into a live album.
It didn’t turn out.
“Listening back to it, the recording was unsalvageable because there was some ghost in the machine or something. But I was grateful that it got messed up, actually, because I could hear myself, in the performance, being aware that it was being recorded,” the Oregon-based folk singer said.
“Ideally,” he continued. “I think the best way to make a live record would be to have somebody recording and you don’t know it.”
That is decidedly not the plan on October 26 at Mississippi Studios, where Martin is not only recording a live album, it’s billed on the venue’s website as “Jeffrey Martin Records A Live Album.” Martin is acutely aware of the plan, but he feels more prepared this time—he has written a bunch of songs and played scores of gigs and gained valuable life experience since last time, after all.
“I feel like I’ll be able to play this show just like any other show,” he said.
He’s looking forward to it, in fact, because it’s an opportunity to capture how his songs have evolved since they were written—songs from his most recent album, last year’s introspective Thank God We Left The Garden; songs from 2017’s stunning One Go Around; and songs from earlier in his career, too.
Martin grew up in Eugene, where he gained an appreciation for hard-luck stories while accompanying his father, a pastor, into the streets to hand out food and clothes to people who needed them. His love of words and the way they fit together led him to become an English teacher, but he quit that job in 2016 to focus on his music career. That move seems to have paid off; Garden earned overwhelmingly positive reviews, with the British music magazine Uncut calling it “a masterpiece.”
It’s a masterpiece in part because Martin knew when to stop working on it. The tracks on Garden were initially recorded by the artist himself—alone, often into the wee hours of the morning—in a small shack on his small corner lot in Southeast Portland. They were intended to be demos for a future session in a real recording studio, but somewhere along the line, Martin listened to them and realized he already had what the songs needed.
“I've never really liked the idea of making a record only after every last piece is figured out and dialed in. I kind of like the idea of doing it when things feel really fresh, because there’s some energy that gets captured,” he said.
“The whole album is pretty simple, and I was able to get a great sound, even in the demos. So I could take these songs into a studio and sit down with a producer … and we could chase ideas about what to add to them, and we could go through that whole process,” he said. “Sometimes that’s a really great process. But sometimes it feels like you’re just getting further and further away from the heart of the thing.”
The heart of Martin’s music has never been hard to find. On Garden, it’s accompanied only by the warmth of a well-played acoustic guitar and Martin’s weathered voice; if you close your eyes and listen real hard, you can practically hear the sound of the space where it was made and the silence of the Portland night outside. Otherwise, the focus is on the songs: Hand-crafted, heart-on-sleeve folk tunes about love and loss, light and dark, hurt, hope, faith and uncertainty, plus all the little bits of life that happen in between and the unending search for meaning and purpose along the way.
Even for an artist with plenty of truth in his catalog, Garden is a particularly honest record.
“Especially coming out of the weirdness of COVID … there was an existential kind of ‘figuring out’ that was happening: ‘Do I want to do this? Am I built to be touring?’” Martin said. “‘And if I’m going to do it, how do I do it? If I’m going to be more and more known by the songs that I write, what do I want those songs to be?’”
It’s worth remembering here that Garden came out in late 2023, which means the process he’s talking about happened quite a long time ago. Martin’s a songwriter—he’s already thinking about the next batch.
“I'm kind of at the point now where I'm just trying to go where the wind blows me and not think about it too much,” he said, “because that’s when I get into the weeds of overwriting and overthinking.”
Jeffrey Martin Records A Live Album at Mississippi Studios, 3939 N Mississippi, Sat Oct 26, 9 pm, $22, tickets here, 21+ w/ Bart Budwig