Jefferson Thomas Gets Personal

Rolls out new single “Upstate Again” June 29, 2006.

(PRWEB) June 8, 2006 -- Jefferson Thomas, www.jeffersonthomas.com, releases new single from COME ALIVE June 29, 2006. Thomas shares thoughts in an interview with Shelly Rosen.

SR: So - “Upstate Again” - what exactly does that mean?

JT: I grew up in upstate New York, and I have a real love-hate relationship with it; every time I go back I swear it’s the last time. I was gonna get married to my high school sweetheart, then I decided to sew some oats and go away to college. I wasn’t real tactful or considerate about it, and that kind of devastated her. During finals week of my freshman year she somehow wrapped her car around a telephone pole in front of my folks’ house, and didn’t survive.

SR: Ouch. That’s pretty heavy.

JT: Well, something like that does tend to stick with you. I didn’t really talk about it for a long time, much less assess it musically. You’ve got to be careful going to a place like that if you’re not ready, or you’ll end up tumbling your whole house of cards. I was sitting around with an old hollow-body electric guitar last year, messing around with these old country records from the late 50s/early 60s. I got that over-the-top vintage reverb thing going on, almost a surf thing, and downed a bottle of wine, and the song just kind of tumbled out. I wasn’t even trying to write a song, it was just this stream-of-consciousness thing, with a lot of inside references and haphazard things that probably don’t make any sense to anybody but me and a few friends.

SR: Yeah, it’s almost kind of a narrative.

JT: I figured it needed an angle, so I decided - what if I kind of try to update her on what’s gone down since she left, you know? Like “here’s what this dude’s up to, and this dude’s doing this, and were you watching when this happened?” Enough time had passed that I was able to go back and look at the whole thing from a detached angle, and just kind of ponder the whole thing. I couldn’t have pulled that off if I had done this right after it happened; I would have been coming from too desperate and intense a place. It’s actually the lack of intensity that I think makes the song work; kind of a resignation or surrender.

SR: You actually name names. Were the names changed to “protect the innocent”?

JT: Hell, no - nobody’s innocent! No, like I said, it was real stream-of-consciousness, real in-the-moment, and I think it works better that way. I think people can identify with names; they don’t need to know who they are. They can project their own experiences into it, name their own names, you know?

SR: Have you done the song live?

JT: Haven’t worked it up with the band yet - that’s coming, but I’ve done it solo. In fact, I did it the other night solo on piano, which took on a totally different vibe.

SR: How risky is it to play such a personal song like that live?

JT: I always write with a certain detachment, and this one is kind of matter-of-fact, which I guess is my defense mechanism against being too personal. I don’t really let you in, you know? As far as it being risky, that’s more a case of it being a ballad, and if you don’t make people give a shit from the first eight bars, you run the risk of losing them. And not just for the song, but maybe for the whole night.

SR: Whose idea was it to go to radio with it?

JT: It was actually mine. I’ve got some things on this record that are certainly more pop, but I’m really liking what’s happening at triple-A radio these days; you can get away with things that aren’t so formulaic. I figured this would be a slow-burn kind of thing, taking a while to develop, not getting tons of adds out of the gate you know? I’m too close to it, I know, but I sort of feel like this song suggests there’s a whole record that needs to be checked into, whereas everything is so single-oriented these days; you’ve got all these acts with one good song and ten other tracks of filler. This song may not be the catchiest piece of candy, but it breathes, you know? I think that’s the real villain we’re all fighting against in music these days; instant gratification.

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