JamisonParker 'Sleepwalker' album

JamisonParker is a band formed by two guys named Jamison and Parker. Nothing else about this band is quite so simple, however. Jamison Covington and Parker Case aren’t content with music’s easy answers: they’ll never be satisfied with the sounds you hear on every other rock record. In his lyrics, Jamison goes beyond the usual romantic platitudes, staring in the face of love to find both its beauty and its pain. The music of JamisonParker is in its way a testament to how there’s a glory in the choices we make.

Sleepwalker is a collection of well-crafted songs fitted with all manner of gorgeous sounds. The guitar tones alone were contrived with the kind of attention to detail that would make a Swiss watchmaker jealous. "We spent hours experimenting with different effects pedals and combinations of those pedals, and different combinations of combinations -- twisting every knob, and tweaking every amp setting." Jamison says. "I already had found tones that I'd grown into and fallen in love with because of my obsession with a few serious musical influences of mine, but I just felt that it was time to take things further, make those tones more of my own… it was definitely a labor of love."

Those labors were aided by producer Ken Andrews, whose appreciation for the kind of magnificent obsession that leads musicians to spend an hour positioning and re-positioning an amp in front of a microphone is evident in the studio work he did for his own bands, Failure, ON and Year Of The Rabbit.

This drive to find just the rightthing in every element of their music is at the heart of the partnership between Parker and Jamison. "Jamison and I are both really, really perfectionists," Parker says, "and that was one of the big things that interested us in each other, that when we sat down to create a song, we thought it all the way through to make sure it was the best we could possibly make it. That was one of the key elements then and still is."

This isn’t about making the songs ornate – there’s nothing to get in the way of their essential tunefulness. "Best Mistake" lurches from its slow-build ("If this holds insignificance, I’ll have the hearse follow the ambulance") to an ascendant chorus ("If this means anything at all/ I won’t let me leave you anymore"). The song captures romantic frisson, that dizzying moment where bliss, hope, doubt and joy flood the brain at near-toxic levels. The disc’s lead track, "Alcohol And Bandages," applies a soaring melody to its images of mental disarray: "the house is still at midnight/ at one we’ll be a wreck… if this is love then kill me now and save me from my life."

Underneath these tracks is a commitment to song structure and detail sure to elude the casual listener.

Lyrics like these are part of what makes the songs on Sleepwalker so memorable. "Slow Suicide" is girded with words twisting conventions into more interesting shapes: "we live like vampires/ and we love like killers/we all die like infants/and we trust like mirrors." That the song also balances acoustic strum with a synthesized squall key to how you could hum the tunes on this record all day without initially realizing all that’s gone into them. For example: "All of these songs on the album are all in alternate tunings," Jamison says. "There are a couple of pages in a notebook that are, from top-to-bottom, filled with tunings that I’d just experimented with nonstop."

Despite the most assiduous attention to detail – and sometimes because of it – accidents happen. Like the name. Jamison and Parker were two guys playing their songs when their names got combined into a handle for the band they’d suddenly become. The two were so focused on the music, they hadn’t really thought about where it would get them. "Everything still feels accidental to me. We sure didn’t plan on any of it happening," Jamison says.

These labors of love aren’t limited to music – sometimes love itself is the labor. It’s a kind of dreamy passion that’s the unifying theme of Sleepwalker. "It’s a romantic record. There’s a dark side and it’s definitely blanketed in loneliness, but it’s all because of just wanting to be with someone, not because that someone walked away. You never really know what being alone is until you know what love is… that's where we find the real romance. All of these songs feel a little confused, but that’s what makes them feel so real."

"I think people are afraid of saying ‘I love you,’ he continues. "I never try to sit down and say ‘okay, let me figure out a subject that will appeal to a lot of people and I’ll just throw the appropriate pronouns in and we’ll get a hit.’ Everything comes from real, honest-to-god everyday life." But wouldn’t such nakedly emotional lyrics, draw from life, be hard to sing night after night? "Some nights are harder than others. Some nights it’s real, real hard to sing those songs, and other nights, they totally make sense and make me feel good that I can sing them."

Putting yourself repeatedly through the wringer, whether it’s in search of the perfect guitar tone, or in dedication to the fine art of artfully spilling your guts, leads to a kind of certainty. Sleepwalker is filled with the confidence and artistic ambition pretty much unchanged since before Jamison and Parker were JamisonParker, when they were just two guys writing songs in a bedroom.

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Tracklisting

JamisonParker - Sleepwalker