Today, Durand Jones announces his debut solo album Wait Til I Get Over (out May 5 via Dead Oceans) and releases its boisterous first single “Lord Have Mercy.” The collection of songs unites to form a defiant embodiment of Jones’ full self: personal and cultural; past, present and future. Sitting atop rock, folk, church music and R&B, Wait Til I Get Over explores worth and belief through love, longing, odes and prayers – grounded in the sound of what it means to go home.
To celebrate the announcement, Jones has released the album’s wild and raw first single “Lord Have Mercy.” Recorded with a live band, the single has a Muscle Shoals quality, loose but precise, sitting in the heart of where R&B crashed into rock n roll in the South.
Directed by award-winning Will Niava (Zoo, Billie Eilish, H.E.R.), the accompanying vividly poignant video cuts back and forth between footage of the rural swamps of Louisiana from present day and from the 1920s, capturing the generational struggle of the people of Hillaryville from Jones’ time and from that of his grandmother’s.
Durand says of “Lord Have Mercy”, “The interlude ends with my Grandmother telling us how she felt about Hillaryville back in the day. Hillaryville is no longer a sanctuary town or ‘place you’d most want to live’. Most people in my generation and younger dream of escaping a place like Hillaryville. And for many the dream never becomes something more. Life can find a way to keep you there if you will let it. I wanted to express this thought through sound in a raw, wild and raucous way. A build of a groove that feels like it is driving through a muddy swamp. Trapped.”
Known as one of the singers and principal songwriters of Durand Jones & the Indications, this solo debut pulls Jones from that highly collaborative band to a place far more vulnerable and singular, and affirms him as a modern vanguard of Southern Black music. Much of Wait Til I Get Over is built on Jones’ relationship to his hometown of Hillaryville, Louisiana, a town first established as a form of reparations to previously enslaved Black Americans. The town, and Jones’ reflections, are a tangle of contradictions: the pristine beauty and the ragged roads; his teenage desire to leave and his adult desire to honor his roots; the plantation history and the ups and downs of the Black community that first made Hillaryville flourish, then suffered through its slow, systemic ravaging.
TRACKLIST
Gerri Marie
The Place You’d Most Want To Live (Interlude)
Lord Have Mercy
Sadie
I Want You
Wait Til I Get Over
That Feeling
See It Through (Interlude)
See It Through
Someday We’ll All Be Free (feat. Skypp)
Letter To My 17 Year Old Self
