Damien Jurado

ON HIS 14TH ALBUM, THE HORIZON JUST LAUGHED, THE IDIOSYNCRATIC SEATTLE SONGWRITER PRESENTS PERSONAL UPHEAVAL IN A MISLEADINGLY LAID-BACK PACKAGE.

“The horizon is in a lot of my work,” Seattle-raised singer-song writer Damian Jurado tells TG, referencing the title of his latest record The Horizon Just Laughed. Washingtonians came west from the east. They didn’t know how long it went. They had no maps. The settlers who came to the West Coast were the real dreamers: wherever they were was not good enough for them. It says something about the people that settled here.”

There’s something of this in Jurado, for sure. The songwriter started off playing a borrowed Gibson SG bass in punk bands, but morphed into a critically-lauded urban folk singer-song writer after discovering Billy Bragg – “my bridge” – in the early 90s. Since then he has ceaselessly chased his muse across 14 solo albums, 15+ EPs and approximately 25 years of music-making, rarely seeming to care, or even notice, whether he is in or out of favour.

“I have pretty bad dyslexia, so I don’t read, ever,” he says. “It’s good and bad. I’m never on email. I stay away from books as much as possible. I don’t watch modern TV. I don’t watch the news. I have no idea what the fuck’s going on in the world half the time and I’m never online, so that to me is a really big influence on my writing. It keeps you in your own lane. Your own world.”