Here's a story about an artist who exemplifies love. Jamie Potter has been making music in the DC area for a long time as a solo artist, with his wife Amy in their bourbon-infused Americana band, The Crooked Angels, and in the Grateful Dead cover band Elixir of Life. He's also the author of a marvelous young adult novel, Thomas Creeper and the Gloomsbury Secret, about a teenage mortician’s apprentice, so he knows how to tell a good story, which he does beautifully over the course of his latest solo album, Love Manifesto.
This album covers a lot of terrain over the course of twelve sweet and bittersweet, moving and thoughtful songs hitting on themes like love at first sight, the beauty of imperfection, and importance of gratitude. Beyond the excellent songwriting, hints of whimsy, and gracious delivery of smart lyrics, this album offers even more love potential: a portion of the proceeds will go directly to the organization Pet Connect, who work to help prevent the amount of strays in our communities, and place the tenderest, most dynamic and loving creatures with families and away from high-rate kill shelters.
DC Music Review had a chance to connect with Jamie to find out more about Love Manifesto, and his love for animals, writing, classical music, and some of his favorite musicians in the DMV area.
Hi Jamie! It's such a treat to connect with you, I've been a fan of your music and creative endeavors for well over a decade. I want to get into this album but first, tell me about your musical background, I feel like you have stories to share.
First, I just want to say what a supreme privilege it is to be part of this incredible DC Music Review interview series! I’m so grateful.
One of my clearest, earliest musical “A-ha!” moments is being five or six, sitting in the back of our old station wagon, and hearing Billy Joel’s “Theme from an Italian Restaurant.” We take a lot of these songs as commonplace now, and so maybe the novelty has faded. Hearing that song for the first time — the way the story develops (stories within stories, actually,); the basic opening arrangement, the swells and builds, the return at the end of the song to that little restaurant table — it is probably an understatement to say that my young mind was blown!
I’m grateful to my parents for bringing music into our home and car stereos and to my older brother for sharing the musical “goods” with me on mix tapes. I remember hearing Bob Marley on a mix, singing and playing with just an acoustic guitar on the “Acoustic Medley” from the Songs of Freedom box set. I remember being moved beyond words. It was more powerful than a full orchestra. The spirit and vibe is what matters most.
Beginning piano around that time opened up a world of sound. Every note has a harmony note, bunches of them, actually. Isn’t that cool? Classical is still the biggest love of my life. I am a great ham-fister of Beethoven sonatas. Rachmaninoff is my homie. One of my piano heroes, Vladmir Ashkenazy, said that young Rachmaninoff is all about expanding outward, all that lushness and fullness. Older Rach is all about collapsing inward, and I wonder if we all do that in our own way with time. I just turned 40 and feel like expanding for another 40 years, not collapsing. We’ll see what gravity and grace have to say about that.
Somehow I'm not worried about you not continuing to expand. It's what you do!
You describe this upcoming album, Love Manifesto, as a sort of “low-fi sonic diary of the past 10 years with love as the major theme." Tell me more about it.
I’m a very DIY guy. I guess that’s kind of an aesthetic by default? A junkyard dog. A rag ‘n bones man. A Tom Waits disciple. Can we put strings on this thing? Oh, that’s an old sewing machine, so maybe not. But maybe?
My mantra for 2023 is “Preservation Not Perfection.” I knew I wanted to do something to boost awareness for the rescue organization my partner Amy and I love and are affiliated with as fosters and recipients of life-changing furry angels — Pet Connect Rescue. Maybe a song, a little happy single. So I started going through the “archives” of old laptops and dusty thumb drives and I started to realize there was a story there. One of my guitar students last year brought in a song to learn for class that was basically a very low-fi nihilistic anthem. That gave me a little courage to be like, “So this guy is whining and playing an out of tune guitar. And he’s got like three million streams?” Can’t compete with that. But maybe I can put out a little more hopeful message. Nihilism is definitely not going to get us through this century, although my heart is with young people navigating a time period where adults have few answers.
I love that mantra. Might adopt it for my 2023 if that's cool with you. So talk to me more about making this DIY album.
These recordings are all about a decade of trying to capture moments in my basic home studio — late nights with the burst of an idea for a song, early mornings with coffee in hand and a dog at my feet. I tried to do everything from the inside out, write it, engineer it, learn to play all the instruments, do the cover art. With the exception of my friend and multi-instrumentalist genius, Nick Sjostrom, who plays bass on “Hearts Like Ours” and kindly mastered the record (thank you, Nick!), I kind of pulled it off. I use an old early 2000s M-Audio preamp. There’s nothing really flashy here. But neither were those old Smithsonian field recordings.
The other fun virtual collaboration is the opening track (“Little Pink Dress Rag”). I bought a pack of live percussion loops recorded by great New Orleans-based percussionists and made a basic rhythm backing track by sequencing parts of those loops. All the proceeds from the purchase of the loop pack went to support continued Katrina relief efforts. To sound even more pretentious than I already do in this interview, that’s the creative alchemy that Love Manifesto is about. A million streams gets you what? A hundred bucks? What if we took some of that raw love material and transmuted it and used it to boost more love and awareness for the helpers and furry angels who enrich our lives? Pets, music, and food are the things I’ve found anyone from any political persuasion can talk about and become brothers and sisters in the conversation, not enemies. Let’s boost that conversation and maybe we’ll survive this century.
The other thing is vulnerability. This is a twelve-track sonic diary. Is that even right to put out into the world? I think so, because it’s raw but not evasive. You hear a human in these recordings — fingers on strings, a vocal that almost gets it right, not a machine. You hear big synths and drums and then everything is quiet like a door was shut and it’s just a guy and a guitar. That’s an aesthetic I learned from another hero, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam. Tea for the Tillerman came out of his hatred of the schmaltzy “star machine” recordings he had to make when he was built up as a teen heartthrob at the beginning of his career. He always said he loved the directness of his guitar and voice on a little home recording setup more than those polished recordings. Maybe I never really got over Bob Marley playing “Acoustic Medley” or Big Bill Broonzy singing “This Train.” I’m fine with that.
I listened to the album front to back and loved it. The theme is prevalent, yet there's such diversity woven throughout the tracks. There was some 1950s innocence, some low hum Radiohead electro vibe, Buddy Holly nods, and straight up great songwriting through and through.
Tell me more about the opening song on the album, "Little Pink Dress." Gosh I adore this one. It reminds me of a sweet little love song that combines folk tunes from my childhood with a little bit of a Mockingbird twang to it.
I think this song could be on a children’s album as easily as an adult record. I love so many musical genres, because music is like food. But I would say Country Blues is pretty close to the vibe of what I love most. There’s a lot of basic blues imagery in this song. I wanted the jazz guitar and the slide resonator to sort of play off each other. I wanted to focus on a simple love, a simple promise. But there’s also the part about the “boys from town,” and not letting them “hold you up so high just to let you fall back down.” Maybe that’s The Great Gatsby when Nick sees the two women at the Buchanan house for the first time. “The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor…”
Clearly you are a writer. And a reader. I love how words from the page play into your songwriting ethos. So next up, about midway through the album the song "I Saw You" blew me out of the water. Can we get Samara Joy to cover this one? Tell me more about this humdinger.
I wanted to write a response to “The Girl from Ipanema” if she was a real woman, not some bouncy, flouncy caricature. I call her “sorrow’s lonely daughter” in the song. It’s a love song, that lightning bolt Romantic thing of falling in love with someone completely at first glance. Then the narrator doubts if he’s coming on too strong. Maybe the song is all his inner monologue as he’s watching this real woman who’s as blue as the water she’s standing in. He decides at the end to just say “I saw you.” Like an old Village Voice ad. He needs to back off. Maybe he’s not the answer to her sorrow. Maybe he is? That’s the hide-and-seek of love. Hopefully you get to be seen in your heart of hearts and that you see someone else that way without masks or dissembling. That may be the gift of love.
It's disarming and gorgeous. And so interesting to hear more about what inspired it.
And then talk to me about the song, "The Man in the Low Castle." I was feeling some really cool Dire Straits, Bruce Springsteen, and Jackson Brown vibes in the music, and the lyrics were really open and gratitude-filled.
“The Man in the Low Castle” is probably me talking about how our egos and ladder-climbing can make us strangers to each other. I’m not so naive to not know what it takes to keep a creative life afloat. I’m extremely lucky to have a supportive family, to have flexible jobs in restaurants and children’s publishing that I can float in and out of, and still make music in the background. I think we are estranged from nature and from ourselves most of the time. You’re really lucky if you can get to a moment or a place when the sun is shining and everything is kind of radiant and you and whoever you are with feel that glow together. That can get you through some really tough times. Music is medicine. Thank you to all the venues and supporters that allow us to keep filling that prescription, day in and day out.
What song of yours (from whenever) are you most proud of and why?
“The Firefly Room” on Love Manifesto is the most recent track on the record, written about a year ago. This one is a direct love song to my partner in all things, Amy. It’s older, slightly maturer love, I suppose, but not without any magic missing. Amy is magic personified. Healer, animal-whisperer, poet. The song is also about the beautiful imperfections which make us human. “With your rings, with the silver in your hair, your crooked tooth, your perfect heart to share.” That’s the unique currency, the good stuff. Aging is strange and wonderful, and I wanted to connect the silver of currency with the silver of age.
So another favorite thing about this album is that you are using it to boost visibility for Pet Connect. As someone who has adopted two dogs, this makes my heart sing. I know you and Amy are animal lovers, too. Tell me more about your involvement with Pet Connect.
My life has been forever changed by the four furry angels we’ve received through Pet Connect. Somehow being animals they’ve made me more human. Kinder, more patient. I think I can bring those feelings and skills into our weird, divisive world because of them. Music and animals give us therapy even when we don’t know they’re doing it. Our late-great border collie/hound mix Bessie kept our house together just by her presence. I can’t tell you what a void it was when she passed in August, but I probably don’t because you’ve experienced that abundance yourself.
For this record I’m asking people to take any funds they might think of using to buy a record (I know, I know, we are all streaming these days) and spend it instead on supporting Pet Connect.
I have special bonuses for bigger donations, limited for my sanity, but definitely fun. A $100 contribution gets you a personal song written for you or a loved one. A $250 contribution gets you a personal song and a personal sketch. A $500 contribution gets you a house concert in the DMV area, and for a $1000 donation, I will travel anywhere on the East Coast for a live performance. Yes, there are limits on how many bonuses are available, but I'm hoping people feel compelled to give to this great organization. (For more information on how to get these donation perks, you can email Jamie at jrpotterbooks@gmail.com.)
I’m hoping in my small way, not only to bring some support financially to Pet Connect’s amazing efforts through this record, but to boost awareness of their “Spay to 1K” Plan. Here’s a little food for thought about their 2021-2022 annual report: “With a total investment of $122K, over 2000 cats and dogs were spayed or neutered across 13 communities, and 8 states. Based on averages provided by the ASPCA, these 2276 animals and their progeny could have produced over 4.4 million offspring in their lifetimes.”
I am all for it. So tell me a little more about you, I know you're an author as well.
When I’m not writing songs, I’m writing and illustrating spooky and nerdy books for young readers. My debut YA novel Thomas Creeper and the Gloomsbury Secret about a reluctant thirteen-year-old mortician’s apprentice who unlocks the secret of his hometown came out during the height of the pandemic. I’m so grateful the book is traveling the world, in over 150 libraries I can track online, and part of two teaching curricula here in the US and the Dominican Republic. You can read the Booklist review here if you like. The sequel hits shelves on June 15th and it’s a doozy! In September, I have a YA cyberpunk retelling of Alice in Wonderland coming out as well. I also write and illustrate literacy-boosting fiction for educational publishers Pioneer Valley Books and Heinemann Publishing. If we can keep young people reading, I believe we might survive this century.
Amen to that, and I can't wait to read the sequel. I adored all the weirdos in Thomas Creeper and the Gloomsbury Secret, I would want to be friends with those misfits back in the day. Heck, even today!
Okay, last question for you, tell me about a local artist that you admire.
Friends and songwriting heroes The Honey Dewdrops keep pushing me to write more earnestly and maybe not as lightning-fast as I like to write. To draft and hone. It’s been a joy being able to see them grow as writers and performers and to hear some of their newest works performed in our little living room for house concerts.
The Honey Dewdrops are wonderful, and I love how quickly you answered that question. And I'm really excited for this album to drop and for all the love to come pouring in to Pet Connect.
Thanks so much for sharing with me, Jamie, and for sharing so much of yourself and your creativity to the world in such positive ways. It's cool to know someone like you!
The pleasure was all mine, thank you again for listening to this love-inspired sonic diary and being so supportive. I am very grateful!
Love Manifesto can be found on all streaming platforms starting Valentine’s Day 2023 as well as this Hear Now page: www.jamiepotter.hearnow.com
(Article Photo Credits: Alyona Vogelmann)
To learn more about Jamie Potter, please see the following resources:
