Jeffrey Martin Finds Beauty in the Mess on Thank God We Left the Garden

One of the basic tenets of conventional Christian doctrine holds that human beings are born inherently flawed because Adam and Eve blew it and got themselves kicked out of the Garden of Eden. The idea of original sin is foundational for Jeffrey Martin on his new album, too, but for a different reason. As Martin sees it, that apocryphal bite of the apple wasn’t some catastrophic downfall for humanity. On the contrary, it was an awakening—the moment when things got interesting.

That’s not to say things didn’t also get complicated. The loss of innocence is a theme that reverberates throughout Thank God We Left the Garden, which is Martin’s first LP since One Go Around in 2017. His latest is a stunner of a record, with songs that are stark in their simplicity, yet emotionally rich in a way that can catch your breath in your throat or leave your eyes suddenly damp. Most of these 11 tracks feature nothing more than Martin singing in a rumpled voice and accompanying himself on acoustic guitar as he gives life to characters reckoning with the innermost parts of themselves.

He returns more than once to images of trees and gardens. “Better to eat the fruit than be blind here,” he sings on “Daylight.” A couple tracks earlier, on “Garden,” Martin suggests that even if humanity somehow fell from grace, our mistakes are what shape us into who we are. “As if the mess that I’m making / Isn’t really a blessing,” he sings. Taken together, those lines define his outlook over the entire album.

Sometimes the mistakes are hard ones. On “Red Station Wagon,” the narrator recalls an episode of youthful cruelty when he used a homophobic slur to rebuff a friend who tried to reveal something about himself in a moment of vulnerability. Augmented by atmospheric electric guitar licks from Jon Neufeld, Martin picks out a quiet minor-key acoustic part and sings without flinching away from the casual ugliness of the incident even as he expresses regret for a way of thinking (or, perhaps, reflexive thoughtlessness) the narrator has since grown beyond.

There’s a different kind of knowledge at the core of “I Didn’t Know,” a song at once poignant and wrenching. The lyrics come from the perspective of someone absorbing the slow realization that his parents—and therefore adults in general—are just making it up as they go. In the aftermath of a family tragedy, Martin sings, “I hugged my dad and left for school older and alone,” and your heart breaks for a kid who, in the phrasing of a different bit of scripture, found himself putting away childish things before having outgrown childhood. That he’s not the only one doesn’t make it any less affecting.

The track is one of a number of story-songs on Thank God We Left the Garden. Other tunes tilt more toward philosophical musings than narrative, but they’re just as potent. Jeffrey Martin’s voice is front and center over quietly strummed guitar on “Paper Crown,” which reads like a 3-and-a-half-minute meditation on the corrosive effects of hiding our true selves in pursuit of things we don’t really want, or need. On “Quiet Man,” Martin takes as his subject the full scope of existence, singing in a full voice as he considers what it means to grow older, to search for love, to find a purpose—to be alive in the first place. It’s about as broad a topic as there is, but Jeffrey Martin handles it the same way he approaches every song on Thank God We Left the Garden: with an open heart, a touch of wit and melodies that linger, all tied together by his powerful imagination.

Eric R. Danton has been contributing to Paste since 2013. His work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe and Pitchfork, among other publications. Follow him on Mastodon or visit his website.