4 To Watch For: Reid Jamieson

Music Features Reid Jamieson

Toronto’s Reid Jamieson is a throwback to the vintage singer/songwriter, a silver-throated troubadour with a penchant for crafting classic hooks. Despite his relative anonymity, Jamieson’s writing somehow feels familiar. But while his songs invoke latter day luminaries like Neil Young, Willie Nelson and The Beatles, they’re neither derivative nor nostalgic.

“I’m still stuck in the past,” Jamieson admits of his musical proclivities. “I listen to a lot of new music as well, but there’s so much older music I keep discovering that’s new to me. There are so many songwriters I heard growing up, but now I’m putting names to the songs and coming to an understanding of what they do.”

Jamieson’s sophomore release, The Unavoidable Truth, is a work of elegant, understated beauty that juggles elements of plaintive folk, rock and countrified pop while enveloping the listener in the atmospheric glow of his soulful vocals. Lyrically, the thirty-one-year-old wrestles with such complex issues as regret and redemption, longing and looking back, facing fears and reconciling lost time. The result is an intelligent, wonderfully humane record, much of it culled from personal tragedy.

“I wanted to let the lyrics come out naturally,” Jamieson explains, “and I think that a large part of having to write about reconciling the past and proving yourself as a person has a lot to do with losing my mom to cancer when I was 14. That tender time when you’re just entering puberty and all the things that come with being a teenager—all of that got buried and it’s still trying to make its way out.”

But like time, music has a remarkable power to heal wounds, and for Jamieson The Unavoidable Truth is a means of confronting his past and coming to a therapeutic resolution.

“I think I’m moving beyond that now,” he says referring to the loss of his mother. “I think this album and the lyrics are a snapshot of a particular time. For some reason it’s this innate human trait to regret things. But if we focus on what we do have, we’ll realize that we might not be where we are today, had we not experienced those events in a certain way, and in a certain place and time.”

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