Thank God We Left The Garden Jeffrey Martin

• 1 Lost Dog 02:59
• 2 Garden 03:02
• 3 Quiet Man 03:39
• 4 Red Station Wagon 04:14
• 5 Paper Crown 03:26
• 6 There Is a Treasure 03:47
• 7 All My Love 02:35
• 8 Daylight 03:44
• 9 I Didn't Know 03:55
• 10 Sculptor 03:29
• 11 Walking 03:39
• Total Runtime 38:29

Info for Thank God We Left The Garden

On a small corner lot in southeast Portland, Oregon, Jeffrey Martin holed up through the winter recording his quietly potent new album Thank God We Left The Garden. Long nights bled into mornings in the tiny shack he built in the backyard, eight feet by ten feet. What began as demos meant for a later visit to a proper studio became the album itself, spare and intimate and true. Recorded live and alone around two microphones, Jeffrey often held his breath to wait for the low diesel hum of a truck to pass one block over on the busy thoroughfare. During the coldest nights, he timed recording between the clicks of the oil coil heater cycling on and off.

Martin’s fourth full length album, Thank God We Left The Garden comes out on Portland’s beloved Fluff and Gravy Records Nov 3. He produced and engineered it himself, recalling, “There was a magic quality to the sounds I was getting in the shack with these two cheap microphones, some lucky recipe of time and place that allowed my voice and the way I play guitar and the shape of these new songs to come together with the kind of honesty I was craving.”

So much has happened in the world since the release of his previous album One Go Around, and Jeffrey has filled the time doggedly, but happily, touring the US and Europe, watching it all unfold in a stream of small town conversations and city sprawl. In a moment where depth is so often traded for the instantaneous, where tech billionaires are building rockets to escape the planet, where the dead-eyed stare of artificial intelligence is promising to existentially upend our world, and where divisiveness in our culture is breeding delusional levels of certainty, Jeffrey Martin’s new record feels like a hopeful and fully human antidote.

The sounds feel warm, close, and refreshingly real, all held up by the richness and rare candor of Jeffrey’s voice. Production is restrained mostly to his guitar and vocals, with flashes of classical guitar for a tumbling wash of melody and low end color. Martin’s voice sits high above everything, reaching into new melodic territory that goes beyond his earlier work. “I feel like I’ve only just learned how to sing,” Martin said. “Like I’ve been chasing this record since my very first recordings. I wanted to really see what I could do, just my guitar and my voice and little else. I don’t think it was conscious. I think maybe it was a reaction to the pace of life these days. The churning news and entertainment and politics and violence of it all. I needed to know that even in this day and age, just a few simple ingredients still hold up.”

This is an album that craves your full attention, best experienced as a whole. Each song further illuminates the scene until you find yourself resting in the strangely comforting tangle of aliveness and meaning (and full spectrum of being alive./what it means to be alive.). At its core Thank God We Left The Garden is an album made of questions, humble and nuanced, a reverent celebration of the asking.

Whether singing about his own internal landscape, telling a story of someone else’s, or reflecting on the elusive relationship between scarcity and contentment, Martin’s writing never pushes the listener away, never points a finger. He sings of things we can all pin a memory on, holding the rough shorn gem of human experience up to the light.

Thank God We Left the Garden will be released on Fluff and Gravy Records on NOV 3, 2023. Subsequent touring will carry Jeffrey Martin through all of the US, Canada, and Europe.

Jeffrey Martin, guitar, vocals
Jon Neufeld, additional guitar on "Red Station Wagon", "Sculptor", "I Didn't Know"

Recorded by Jeffrey Martin
Mixed and Mastered by Jon Neufeld
Produced by Jeffrey Martin and Jon Neufeld

Jeffrey Martin
As a babe Jeffrey Martin sought out solitude as often as he could find it. He’s always been that way, and he has never understood the whole phenomenon of smiling in pictures, although he is a very happy guy. One night in middle school he stayed up under the covers with a flashlight and a DiscMan, listening to Reba McEntire’s 'That’s the Night that the Lights Went Out in Georgia' on repeat until the DiscMan ran out of batteries. That night he became a songwriter, although he didn’t actually write a song until years later. After high school he spent a few years distracting himself from having to gather up the courage to do what he knew he had to do.

Eventually he found his way to a writing degree, and then a teaching degree. He wrote most days like his life depended on it, all sorts of things, not just songs, but songs too. He fell in love with teaching high school English, which was fantastic because he never thought he’d actually come to truly love it. His students were fierce and unstoppable forces of noise and curiosity, and for all that they took from him in sleep and sense, they gave him a hundred times back in sparks and humility.

All the while he was also playing truckloads of music. There was one weekend where he flew to LA while grading essays on the plane, played two shows, and then flew back home, still grading essays, and woke up to teach at 5 am on Monday morning. It was around this time he started wondering if such a life was sustainable.

Alas, music, the tour life, was a constant raccoon scratching at the back door. Jeffrey spent nights on end sitting up in bed, and then sitting on the front porch, staring off into the dark, wondering if he could bear to leave teaching to go on tour full time. Eventually his brain caught up with what his guts had known for months. With tears in his eyes he announced to his students that he wouldn’t be back the following year, and that he didn’t feel right hollering at them to chase their dreams at all cost if he wasn’t going to do the same.

Jeffrey Martin tours full time now. He is always making music, and he is always coming through your town. He misses teaching like you might miss a good old friend who you know you’ll meet again.

He currently lives in Portland, Oregon but feels lately that it has become a secret that someone figured out how to monetize. And since he has no money of any kind, everything beautiful about the city is marred by the quiet ticking of a countdown toward the day that he’ll have to find somewhere to live that doesn’t require a steady bleeding fortune.

This album contains no booklet.