On John Hollywood’s new track “The Jar” he uses lo-fi production and tone to draw the listener’s ear into what could’ve just been another folk song. There’s a lot more to this one than just another matter-of-fact Americana song in the style of John Prine that’s been popular since the success of his self-titled Album. The instrumentation once it gets moving is enough to keep your attention as horns and woodwinds fill in around the simply strummed acoustic guitar to create a beautiful tapestry for John’s voice to lay over. Poetically he hits you with line after line of rhymes to continuously lead back to “I’m scraping, I’m scraping, I’m scraping the bottom of the jar. Standout line in this one “Why do some lives run without hiccups while others get stuck in a rut?/ They say it’s hard work, but it seems clear to me that it’s almost entirely luck.”
“I wrote this song about a month after John Prine died, in the early days of the pandemic. Prine was my favorite songwriter and I was devastated when he died. The Jar is a blues, a tune about feeling trapped in some hopeless situation. I think I was sort of imagining John Prine’s spirit when I wrote the song,” says Hollywood.
One Response
uh, no.