Jeffrey Martin

As a babe Jeffrey Martin sought out solitude as often as he could find it. He’s always been that way, and he has never understood the whole phenomenon of smiling in pictures, although he is a very happy guy. One night in middle school he stayed up under the covers with a flashlight and a DiscMan, listening to Reba McEntire’s 'That’s the Night that the Lights Went Out in Georgia' on repeat until the DiscMan ran out of batteries. That night he became a songwriter, although he didn’t actually write a song until years later. After high school he spent a few years distracting himself from having to gather up the courage to do what he knew he had to do.

Eventually he found his way to a writing degree, and then a teaching degree. He wrote most days like his life depended on it, all sorts of things, not just songs, but songs too. He fell in love with teaching high school English, which was fantastic because he never thought he’d actually come to truly love it. His students were fierce and unstoppable forces of noise and curiosity, and for all that they took from him in sleep and sense, they gave him a hundred times back in sparks and humility.  

All the while he was also playing truckloads of music. There was one weekend where he flew to LA while grading essays on the plane, played two shows, and then flew back home, still grading essays, and woke up to teach at 5 am on Monday morning. It was around this time he started wondering if such a life was sustainable.

Alas, music, the tour life, was a constant raccoon scratching at the back door. Jeffrey spent nights on end sitting up in bed, and then sitting on the front porch, staring off into the dark, wondering if he could bear to leave teaching to go on tour full time. Eventually his brain caught up with what his guts had known for months. With tears in his eyes he announced to his students that he wouldn’t be back the following year, and that he didn’t feel right hollering at them to chase their dreams at all cost if he wasn’t going to do the same.

Jeffrey Martin tours full time now. He is always making music, and he is always coming through your town. He misses teaching like you might miss a good old friend who you know you’ll meet again.

Here we are. Mysterious humanity unfolding. Animal nature howling. How do we learn what it means? Maybe being here is a story told by all of us at once, a constant reaching for language, an impossible telling of something inherently indescribable. Animal Poem is a meditation on the attempt. How do we talk about destiny from the balcony of a nation in decline? How does our attention shape the way we touch the natural world? In the face of endless avarice and cruelty, how do we talk about the realness of love?

Recorded live in a circle with some of my dearest friends, Animal Poem was made in conversation. We wanted to be together in the room, to listen and respond in real time without the separation of walls and headphones. Everyone in the studio made it feel so open, made it easy to forget technology and permanence and just play, messy and alive. It’s this vital mess that moves me when I listen now – ghost notes in the high register of the piano, melodic guitar and bass lines briefly interwoven, earthy cymbals breathing, my dog barking. We came back to add saxophone, strings, vocal harmonies, and a few other tastes, but most of what you hear is just people sitting together in a small room, listening and talking with tenderness and abandon.

This album is my own small addition to the communal story. The water we swim in. The way our attention molds our truths. Humanity is unfolding as we describe it. We’ll never get it right, but the attempt is everything.

Despite being born in the city, Everett has never been drawn to it. Raised in a blue-collar suburb of Salt Lake, he began looking for ways to leave town well before he could drive. At 14, he began spending his summers working in Utah’s mountains, something he’d do well into his twenties.

His first guitar came from a Wyoming pawn shop. During those years, he always seemed to be in trouble, and rather than fire him, his boss (a guitar player himself) had an idea. One weekend, he took him down the canyon in an old beat-up Ford truck and not only helped him find a guitar, he helped him pay for it. It not only kept him out of trouble, it gave him a friend for the rest of his life. The kindness of that gesture will never be forgotten.

By 26, he had performed from California to Virginia, but never found the time to make an album. In 2004 his wife became pregnant with their first child. Months later, he quietly made the choice to put his music career aside to focus on being a dad, a decision he has never regretted once.

Now, with two sons who are talented musicians in their own right, singer-songwriter Everett Rogers is releasing his first album. Waiting for the Sun is a collection of late-night living room songs, each one steeped in patience, waiting for the right moment to be heard.

When he isn’t making music, you can find him at the family cabin, the one he built himself, or standing in a river somewhere out West, trying to find a little peace, and perhaps a few trout.