Culture

Jeffrey Martin – 2024 NMF Sycamore Sessions

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NELSONVILLE, Ohio (WOUB) – Jeffrey Martin is an indie folk singer-songwriter based out of Portland, whose most recent release, 2023’s Thank God We Left the Garden (Fluff and Gravy), notably garnered critical comparisons to ‘prime John Prine’—a sentiment that, on its own, is among the highest honors a music critic can bestow.

Martin’s songwriting could broadly be described as “introspective,” but not in the basic sense of the word. It’s not that the songs are about Martin’s internal world (necessarily); instead, they trace the moments of emotional, biological, and perhaps even spiritual intensity which color all human experience.

Again and again, he invites his listeners to all these heady places and somehow we always want to board the bus, without a single smart remark or even the urge to cringe. That’s because – in a way that perhaps only a former high school English teacher can – he trusts us to understand these often complex transmissions, as in his Sycamore Session opener Lost Dog, which asks us—if only for a moment—to understand desperation as a kind of lost dog, sure to be dead by morning and uncertain of the origin of the blood in its mouth.

SET LIST 

1. Lost Dog – 0:30
2. Quiet Man – 4:30
3. Billy Burroughs – 10:05
4. Thrift Store Dress – 18:00
5. Down at the Bottom – 22:30
6. Garden – 26:00
7. Red Station Wagon – 30:07
8. Sad Blue Eyes – 36:34
9. Thief and a Liar – 43:00
10. There is a Treasure -48:00

Jeffrey Martin performing at the 2024 Nelsonville Music Festival for his 2024 Sycamore Session.
Jeffrey Martin performs for his 2024 Sycamore Session. (Henry Day/WOUB)

The Sycamore Sessions are presented by the Nelsonville Music Festival in collaboration with WOUB Public Media and the Ohio University Scripps College of Communication’s School of Media Arts and Studies. The videos are produced by Media Arts and Studies students under the guidance of Director Andie Walla, Host Josh Antonuccio, WOUB Producers Nathan Cain and Emily Votaw, and personnel from Stuart’s Opera House and the Nelsonville Music Festival. All performances took place during the 2024 Nelsonville Music Festival, which is a production of Stuart’s Opera House.