This is an artist who only knows how to write the most brutally honest, the most touching and unburdening songs each time pen meets paper, never willing to settle for anything that feels even remotely empty.
Singer/Songwriter (#570.15) and Red Dirt (#550.7) on the Country DDS. AI = “Clean”Sharing dispatches from the seedy and downtrodden side of life that ultimately blossoms into inspiring stories of redemption and renewal, JD Graham fearlessly mines the very depths of emotion as he explores the most involved contours of the songwriting discipline. This is an artist who only knows how to write the most brutally honest, the most touching and unburdening songs each time pen meets paper, knowing he might fail at finding an audience for it, but is never willing to settle for anything that feels even remotely empty or inferior. JD Graham almost didn’t make it to see the release of his latest album Uppers & Downers. A devastating car accident on February 24th landed him in an Intensive Care Unit, fighting for his life and future mobility. Luckily, he made it out alive, and after surgery, hopes for no major irreparable damage moving forward. But the US and European tour he had planned to coincide with the album has been canceled, and he considered pausing the release as well. But Uppers & Downers is very much an album of medicine. It’s about healing and recovery, the overcoming of obstacles and adversities, and finding an inner strength to rise up and defy odds, often at the very depths of sorrow and destitution. Only fitting that JD Graham shares these stark doses of reality at a traumatic time in his own life. The album starts off with the song “Diamond (The Stripper Song).” It’s not entirely novel in its character study of a dancing girl whose life descends into sin before trying to come clean. The difference about JD Graham’s version is it’s not a work of fiction. Like so many of his songs, it’s ripped straight from his reality and based on someone close to him. You feel this intimacy with the story in every word and line—in how carefully and passionately his songs are delivered. Perhaps the masterpiece of the album is the second song, “Truth in Tears,” presented as a duet with Tulsa music legend John Fullbright. Every day we all engage in fake smiles and put-on pleasantries as part of routine. But tears never betray the emotions behind them. Leave it to JD Graham to express this in a way that rings so true.
Uppers & Downers was co-produced by Jason Weinheimer, and recorded with what you could consider the Tulsa Wrecking Crew of musicians, namely John Fullbright on keys, Jesse Aycock and Stephen Lee on guitars, John Rickard on pedal steel, and Paddy Ryan on drums. The music really sculpts itself around JD’s songs. It’s less interested in being expressive itself, and more focused on trying to accentuate what JD Graham is doing. What JD does beyond pen stunning compositions is deliver them with one of the most natural and effortless vibratos you will ever encounter in music. Sweep all the other praise you can bring to bear on JD Graham aside for a second. His vocal delivery is a thing of masterful beauty. Combined with his superior songs, this is really what turns the whole listening experience sublime. “Alter of Grief,” the tragedy of “Danielle,” the warmness of “My Old Friend,” the sorrow of “Leavin’”—there is no letup, no quarter shown to your emotional receptors on Uppers & Downers. It’s definitely more down than up. But as we all know, the greatest upper comes from downer songs. Then JD Graham deftly explores the power of words in the Chilling passages of “The Writer.” He understand the responsibility someone with a rapt audience can have, and the weight behind the words they choose. Uppers & Downers is one of those albums that challenges the listener to lean in and listen intently. You could even say it comes across as a bit “one note” in its understated and slow nature one song after another. This dynamic is shaken up when you get to the up-tempo and rockin’ “Dead Man’s Disguise,” chased by “I Don’t Need Nothin’.” But at this point, you’re at the end of the album when these tracks could have been sequenced earlier to stir the energy. “Nobody seems to listen ’till your dead,” Graham sings in the solemn and true track “Empty Seats.” Like so many of the top-level songwriters of our time, JD Graham has been laboring away in relative obscurity for much of his career, though in recent years the pull of his songs have been hard to overcome, and he’s been enjoying bigger and bigger draws. How ironic is it that to took almost dying for places like Fox News, People Magazine, and Taste of Country to finally pay attention to JD Graham. It was for tragic reasons, but maybe the divinity was in the right place. Uppers & Downers is a career effort from JD Graham, revealing him as a world-class songwriter worthy of wide attention beyond any personal tragedy. 8.5/10 – – – – – – – – – –
I love his music, I pray he has a quick and successful recovery. One of, if not the best writer out there today.
…i’m not sure what a playlist – or mix tape – full of stripper songs would make one look like, but you don’t have to go back to bob seger’s “mainstreet” any more to find some diamonds of that particular shadowgenre. jd’s “diamond” lives up to the great observational of seger, tony logue’s “yellow rose, tracy byrd’s “a cowboy and a dancer” – or super ash’s “gospel night at the strip club”. sounds like some album jd has out there.
As I worked my way through this one I kept thinking “where’s the Red Dirt” Trig? And then you find it in the last 3 songs. This is a really good album. Wow. My only way to describe it is if Wade Bowen were singing Gabe Lee songs. I hear a lot of Wade in his vocal style although JD can go lower. This one will be getting a ton of spins and very well wind up on my AOTY list come December. I takes awhile to get to the bangers at the end but I never felt compelled to speed through it because the guy just sucks you in with that stellar voice and lyrics that stir your soul.
“Red Dirt” can be more of a regional identifier just as much as a sound. Since JD Graham is originally from Oklahoma and he went to Tulsa with the intent of capturing a specific sound, that tag felt relevant. Red Dirt also has a lot of folk and singer/songwriter influences in it thanks to Whhy Guthrie. So I felt it was important to distinguish this with that tag.
Well, on or about February 26, JD Graham posted a video where he revealed that he was “barely alive” after having just broken his neck, his back and his ribs in a horrific accident. Around four days later his daughter posted that his condition is actually WORSE than they thought, and his recovery will take LONGER than expected. And some two days after that he posted a video of him leaving the hospital, in the front seat of a passenger car. with just a neck brace for protection.
So it appears your prayers are being answered. JD certainly seems on track to having the quickestt, most successful recovery ever from injuries of this breadth and magnitude. Praise the Lord!
Tysm for your tireless work keeping us all updated on this story. I presume that even SCM readers that aren’t particularly fans of the s/s lane that he rolls in, they still would agree JD is a child of God that deserves any and all of the grace we can muster.
Sounds like a cool release with grit and authentic songwriting from a new artist. Tulsa has a very cool roots scene (Horton Records). Glad to see John F. and Jesse A. on board (no Paul Benjamin?).
However I could not help think about the great John Dee Graham and his health issues and persistence to release music from the heart. Just struck me as very ironic how the similar names had similar paths.
Even without the surrounding context surrounding Graham and holding onto dear life, the opener “Diamond (The Stripper Song)” is such an instantaneous gut-punch that’s all the more timely given Kimberly Kelly just released a new single of her own titled “Stripper For A Week” which concerns and empathizes with what drives and motivates people to go the distance in doing the things they do often for their own survival or providing for their families. The latter’s more of a collective snapshot, whereas this is a more individual snapshot into an Oklahoma stripper’s reality: replete with a grandmother warning she’s going to hell, a 1977 gold Trans Am and a fourteenth AA meeting grappling with a cocaine addiction………..and what I appreciate most about Graham’s framing is that he provides a non-judgmental assessment of what she’s been and is going through as he illustrates the rough reality shaping her.
I think choosing to lead the album with this was the correct move: because shedding a light of sympathy on Diamond’s travails makes a core song like “Truth In Tears”………..which I interpret as being one of the emotional cornerstones of the album…………..all the more poignant and haunting: with describing a rainbow stealing its colors from the dark such a striking image: with Graham and Fullbright both reminding us of the strength in vulnerability and the potential healing that comes in putting tears to paper.
After a brief reprieve with “Hail To The Good Times” (which I definitely agree with the sentiment of, though find its sequencing on the album a bit strange a decision)……………”Altar Of Grief” was also hard to listen to on first listen because the opening lines also feel like they apply hand-in-glove to Graham’s current reality following his latest accident:
“It is wrong for me to sit at the graveyard gettin’ stoned?
I’m tryin’ to make it through another day,
it’s been a hell of a year.
I’ve been tryin’ to heal, even took some pills.
Nothin’ seems to change.
Well they say patience is your friend,
when you’re on the mend.
well time’s a thief in an empty room.
So I poured cocaine on the clock,
to try and speed it up,
cuz it’s been stuck.
Will it ever move………..in this altar of grief,
digging canyons in me.”
What I also appreciate about this album besides its raw honesty and vulnerability…………..is that it knows how to stylistically mix up arrangements to differentiate real-life stories from each other. “Danielle” sounds distinct from “Diamond” with the faster tempo, cascading pianos and guitar solo, some tracks like “My Old Friend” and “Leavin’” feel a bit more reminiscent of Jackson Browne to me while others like “Dyin’ Man’s Disguise” and “I Don’t Need Nothin’” resemble more Red Dirt rockers (I totally agree they’re weirdly sequenced on the record)…………which I think is important for an album replete with other peoples’ stories and slices of life besides his own.
“I can turn fifth into riches,
and dealers into snitches,
start a revolution,
in downtown Beirut.
I can make a poor man find gold,
and the devil sell his own soul,
to a preacher down on Sixth Avenue.”
All in all this is definitely a gripping listen throughout. If I were to critique an aspect of this album, it would definitely have to be its sequencing. As I mentioned earlier I feel having a song like “Hail To The Good Times” right on the heels of “Truth In Tears” is a bit curious early in the album (“Hail To The Good Times” is my least favorite song on the album for that matter)……………and then like Trigger said having two of the album’s rockers back-to-back toward the very end of the album also seems a bit head-scratching when I probably would have placed one of them in-between the run of five slower to mid-tempo songs beginning with “My Old Friend” and “Empty Seats” in its mid-section.
And because of the sequencing concern: I’d also argue the album begins much stronger than it ends. “Diamond (The Stripper Song)” is about as perfect an album opener you can ask for, whereas “I Don’t Need Nothin’” (or “Wastin’ Time” if you include the bonus track) to me sounds like an improved version of all those songs in Nashville that list off a bunch of things that need something else or go well with something else before ultimately saying the song’s narrator and subject are meant for each other…………which is cute but I feel the album could have ended on a more poignant, personal note that also tied the album’s core thesis together.
Despite those thoughts: this is a very raw, cathartic album that I hope finally gives Graham much wider recognition and respect…………………and Graham is definitely in my thoughts from here on out as I know it’s only going to get tougher for him for a while before it (hopefully) gets better.
Side Note: I listened to this album on YouTube (I consume most of my music on Bandcamp, YouTube and for other genres Beatport)…………and much to my surprise and potential embarrassment found out the way the album is sequenced on wax is quite different than it was arranged on YT (which also begins with “Diamond” but is noticeably different from there). So my bad and having realizing that: I’m going to listen through again and my final rating may change knowing that “Altar Of Grief” is the final track: which makes MUCH more sense in my view. Just wanted to fess up and be authentic of my initial listening experience. 😊
Source: savingcountrymusic.com