Damien Jurado

As the rest of the housemates soldiered on in dead-end jobs and the obscurity of their respective independent bands, Jurado was the ?rst to break the slacker mold. He married his high-school sweetheart, got a steady job, and began enjoying a new level of success after playing a show on short notice with fellow singer/songwriter Jeremy Enigk, whom he’d known since his hardcore days, back when Enigk was with Sunny Day Real Estate. The audience, which included Jonathan Poneman, co-owner of Sub Pop Records, was blown away that night. Jurado soon had a one-off deal for a seven-inch single, which did well, and Sub Pop offcially added him to the roster. In the following years, four full-lengths and two EPs bore the label’s moniker.

Jurado’s ?rst few releases demonstrate his lighter side, with two songs about motorbikes and trampolines. Though the LP debut, Waters Ave. S., partially retained that lightheartedness, he was moving his songwriting toward a detached voyeurism. Gone were the days of introspection and preaching: The subsequent releases plunged into a world of strangers’ mishaps and failed relationships. Such sober themes permeate the folky Rehearsals for Departure and the more experimental Ghost of David.

Though Sub Pop offered more exposure, in 2002 Jurado moved to the small, Bloomington, Ind.-based indie, Secretly Canadian, where he’s since cranked out the Big Let Down/Make Up Your Mind EP, the haunting Where Shall You Take Me? LP and the more recent, stripped-down Just in Time for Something EP. And just when you thought you were caught up with all his releases, On My Way to Absence hits shelves April 5, delving into even darker territory with what Jurado describes as “a tribute to jealousy.”

On his albums, Jurado is notably ambivalent toward confessionalism, but his lyrical style wasn’t always that way. “There was a lot of me that was coming through the music [in the Guilty and Coolidge days], and that started to bum me out,” explains Jurado “Even now, fellow singer/songwriters that I know, that are writing mellow music—I just wish more people would take the focus off themselves and turn it to something else. They should turn it to the outside instead of the inside. Cause the inside’s just …what the hell is that? Who cares? Go outside of your world a little bit, buddy.”

To illustrate his detached approach, Jurado tells a story about a director’s commentary on the DVD House of Sand and Fog. “[In it] the director was asking [Ben] Kingsley about certain scenes. He said ‘I was moved, I was bawling throughout a particular scene on the set. How do you do it?’ and Kingsley said ‘it’s not me, it’s the character—I have to be the character, I cannot draw my own personal experiences into this.’ And I thought ‘gosh, that’s exactly how I feel about songwriting’. I can’t let my own personal life go into it because it becomes muddled and I’m not speaking for the other person.”