What can loss teach us about love and how do love’s many small acts give a life meaning?

These are some of the questions that have preoccupied me as I’ve been making my fourth album ‘A Reckoning Bell’ over the last eighteen months while trying to be a good husband and son, friend and colleague and helping to care for my Dad with Alzheimer’s disease.

The title of this first single is both a reference to Woody Guthrie’s autobiography of the same name, taken from a term for jumping a train with no care for the destination, as well as a nod to notions of death as heading ‘home to glory’ and the inevitability of loss as part of life. The single is accompanied by a film shot in Australia’s Blue Mountains from director Mirco Guidon about the journeys we go on to find meaning in love in the shadow of impending loss.

Making music has always been a way of working out what I think, but in the midst of this intensely emotional time, it has also been a raft when the ground has given way. But as much as music helps me, I don’t make records for myself. I do it because I believe that music has a social function in allowing people to project themselves into and onto songs to come to know themselves and their own lives better. This belief gives me a sense of purpose and that is the spirit in which I offer this music to you, that it may be useful if it’s what you need.

As I’ve grown I’m finding there’s no bottom to the well of human experience, that it just gets deeper and more complex. ‘Such is life’ Ned Kelly is reported to have said at the end. But in my experience, the light always finds a crack to shine through and there is nothing more beautiful than that.

All love

Jamie x