Jason Eady’s been making music for a few decades now, sharing songs and albums that capture the magic of old-school country music. Some tunes weave in a folk-inflected ethos, others interlace the blues, jazz and rock. In the ‘70s, ‘80s and even ‘90s, of course, he’d have been called country and that would be that. In the parlance of today, however, he’s lumped into the all-encompassing Americana genre.
Released last month, “Old Wanderer” is a remarkable folk-flavored set that surveys the landscape of modern life via three distinct sections: “Leaving Kind of Way,” “Old Wanderer” and “Mean Spirits.” On his Instagram page, Eady explains that they began as distinct entities, but once he entered the studio to record them, “I realized that there was a theme running through the songs—they all cover some aspect of moving through the journey. In ‘Leaving Kind of Way,’ the character is wandering out of fear, moving for the sake of not getting hurt. In ‘Old Wanderer,’ the character is wandering on more of a path of discovery, and ‘Mean Spirits’ is an endpoint where the character comes out on the other side. We ended up recording them all as one piece that moves from one to the other so that they flow together and hopefully take the listener on that same journey.”
The journey, of course, is this thing we call life.
“Leaving Kind of Way,” focuses on a woman who keeps people at an arm’s length; I’d wager she’s been hurt before: “She don’t let just anybody in/One will get through every now and then/She’ll turn a lover into a stranger/There’s no hope but there’s no danger/She don’t let just anybody in.” “Old Wanderer,” expands the instrumentation and skips across the gender and age lines with a touching look at an older gent who once roamed town to town, no doubt fleeing something he never quite understood. Now, however, he faces the unescapable truth about life: “And as days they come and as days they go/He finally realizes everybody grows old/He’s too tired to fight it so maybe he’ll just ride it on in.” In “Mean Spirits,” the narrator turns the attention to himself, explaining why he gave up the bottle and offering some hard-won wisdom along the way: “Show me your friends I’ll show you your future/Find the ones you want to keep around/Others they’re like crabs in a bucket/You start to get up and they pull you back down.”
The modern American trilogy runs almost 10 minutes, so folks with short attention spans may want to take a pass. For the rest of us, however, it’s a moving exploration of modern life that closes with apt advice: “Everybody’s screaming at each other/Everybody’s got something to say/Turn off your TV talk to your neighbors/Be the reason somebody has a better day.”
The Old Grey Cat 
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