199: Jens Kuross - What I Miss Most Of All
The dusty and staggering magic of Jens Kuross
It's always satisfying when we're able to follow a flailing little thread from one post to the next. Which is to say that the same day we were sharing Hayden Pedigo's new collaboration (with the brilliantly noisy Chat Pile), Jens Kuross, a songwriter from Boise, Idaho, was releasing a brand new album which just so happens to be co-produced with the Texan guitarist.
Suitably titled Crooked Songs, these eight songs are indeed oddly slanted, tipped in just a way you have to crane your own neck to try and find the true shape of them. They're dusty, too. Filled with ambience, coated in a blanket of motes.
Such imagery plays into the mythology around Kuross, who has been described as "hiding in plain sight", such is the sheer strength of this record, the broken kind of magic it holds. He "fumbled a career as an LA session musician and songwriter", he was "a cabinet maker in Idaho". There's certainly a unique craft at play here, a palpable sense of fascination of the kind that Pedigo stumbled upon one day, when Kuross was the local opener at one of this shows.
"I’d never heard of Jens Kuross, a local act selected by the promoter to open the show," Pedigo says of this discovery. "Before the show, we went to dinner together and he told me, 'I'm just gonna play my Wurlitzer and sing with some ambient synth stuff and see what happens'. An hour later, with everyone sitting on that basement floor, Jens began to play. In the first twenty seconds, my wife and I looked at each other like, 'Are you hearing what I’m hearing?'. Jens played these beautiful, touching songs that sounded something like Arthur Russell-meets-Harry Nilsson. By the second song, I was in tears. It was the first live performance that ever made me cry. At the end of his set, I told my wife that it was the single best live performance I had ever seen."
It's not difficult to imagine being so wrapped up. These songs breathe, really breathe. Something human. Something musty; the smell of things kept hidden. They roll out gently but with a certain kind of power. Strange and beautiful secrets; shadows dancing in an empty room.
The song below is the album opener, 'What I Miss Most Of All'. I share it here so you begin right at the start-point, so you don't miss a second – though it's beautiful in its own right of course. Breath sighs, furniture creaks, ghosts whisper. Hearts wheeze.
It's hard to know what to say when you find things like this. Small reminders that out there things are happening, whether they find their way to us or not. Maybe these words are enough to make you listen, a thread of their own you can follow down into that basement, on into the world they create from nothing. I hope they are. I hope you find the same kind of fascination here, that the world feels a little crooked for a moment if you do. It should get like that sometimes.
Crooked Songs is out now via Woodsist, available via Bandcamp
