Jon Dee Graham’s artistry and accomplishments are well-known throughout his native Texas and the music community beyond as a seminal figure in Texas punk and Americana (the Skunks and True Believers), as a hotshot guitarist for other artists, as an explosive performer whose club sets leave no prisoners and — most of all — as a singer-songwriter whose range extends from a whisper to a howl, and from the highest highs to the lowest depths.
Jon Dee is back with Only Dead for a Little While, out November 10 on New West subsidiary Strolling Bones Records. The album brings Graham’s career full circle—back to the New West family, where the three albums he released after the turn of the century helped launch him as a solo artist. It’s his first release in seven years—following the highly-acclaimed Knoxville Skyline EP in 2016—and his first full-length album of new material since 2010’s It’s Not As Bad As It Looks. He began recording it in anticipation of his 60th birthday, a musical meditation on that milestone, and has finished it as a 64-year-old survivor of Covid and everything else the world wants to throw at him. The result is a full-force triumph that reflects the seismic challenges we’ve been through—the pandemic or all of us, financial and medical and psychological issues for some of us, a return from the dead for it least one of us—and reassures that everything will somehow work out.
Today Glide is excited to premiere the album’s first single “See You By the Fire,” which refers to a dream Jon Dee had following his “death” in 2019. In 2019, he was making his annual appearance at the FitzGerald’s American Music Festival, outside Chicago, a tradition over the Fourth of July weekend. It was as hot as it usually is, and Jon Dee had been touring hard, as he usually did. He played the sort of blistering set for a couple hours that he always does. “That’s always one of my favorite events, and I’m sweating and I’m not drinking enough water, and, you know me, I pretty much leave it all on the stage,” he recalls. “So I went back to the van and turned on the air conditioner and that’s the last thing I remember. I found out later that when they found me my heart had stopped and I had quit breathing. Apparently, they had hit me with the paddles, and I came back. In typical Jon Dee fashion, the song is the kind of straightforward rocker that feels hard to come by these days. Lyrically, he captures the moment when he reaches life after death and turns it into a a campfire singalong. With Jon Dee’s signature gritty vocals leading the charge, the tune manages to be both catchy and rocking in a Neil Young sort of fashion. Tying it all together is the dreamy guitar flourishes that add a sentimental, ethereal quality to the tune.
LISTEN:
