Jerry Joseph releases his third single, “Bone Towers”, off his upcoming album, The Beautiful Madness. Produced by Patterson Hood with Drive-By Truckers as his band, the album will be released worldwide on August 21, 2020. The track release is accompanied by a lyric video created by Thomas Van Genderen. View it here.
“Bone Towers” places the listener at the unraveling of a relationship, drawing imagery from the skeletal structures of unfinished skyscrapers, left to blow in the wind after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The same towers which were right outside the window where Jerry wrote it.
Jerry was working on a series of songs about the middle of marriage, the years where it can feel routine and predictable but where there is also a solid foundation, a life, the partners have built together that keeps them bonded. The songs on this album were written in various places around the world, but this song was composed in the unlikely location of Sulaymaniyah, Kurdistan while Jerry was there teaching children in a permanent refugee camp how to play guitar with his non-profit, Nomad Music Foundation.
Jerry explains, “My friend Charlie Freeman and I have a non-profit, Nomad Music Foundation, where we personally take guitars to war zones and refugee camps and teach kids guitar and how to wave their arms in the air like rock singers. Our first time in Iraq (Kurdistan, Sulaymaniyah), we were in an apartment building next door to three unfinished luxury apartment towers, just concrete and steel (like a lot of disaster torn areas). They looked like skeletons so we said we were staying by the bone towers – to taxis, new friends etc. How I wrote about marriage with that metaphor and am still married, I have no idea.”
“Originally for this song cycle, I was interested in writing about marriage, not the beginning ‘she’s my spirit animal,’ or the end, break-up/divorce songs are easy, but that middle part, ten years in, where perhaps the passion and even the attraction comes and goes but you are all in as a partnership, kids and house and looking at the end run together,” Jerry elaborates.
“This was a hard one in the studio”, Jerry recalls, “Patterson had an unwavering vision (including not letting me sing like I know how to) and he was spot on. It’s ridiculously beautiful to me every time I hear it and Mike Cooley’s guitar work is sublime.”
The Beautiful Madness was recorded at Matt Patton’s studio, Dial Back Sound, in Water Valley, Mississippi, with chief engineer, Bronson Tew. The band, christened The Stiff Boys by Joseph, was Brad Morgan on drums, Matt Patton on bass, Hood on guitar and Jay Gonzalez on piano, organ, Wurlitzer and synthesizer. Schaefer Llana sang harmonies and vocals. They recorded the album in six days.
Later Mike Cooley added banjo and guitar and Jason Isbell played slide guitar on one track. Kyleen King (Brandi Carlisle, The Shins, Stephen Malkmus) played viola on several tracks and Little Sue Weaver added harmonies. Adam Lee mixed the whole thing at Halfling Studio in Portland Oregon. The 10-song album will be released on August 21, 2020 on Cosmo Sex School/Soundly Music in North America and Décor Records/El Cortez in Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
Photo by Jason Thrasher
