If you haven’t heard of Jerry Joseph, don’t worry, I’m sure you’re not alone. He’s had the kind of life and career in music that reads like a novel. From incarceration and being sent to boarding school in New Zealand as a child, to founding non-profit the Nomad Music Organization, and touring the world as a solo artist and with his succession of bands, from 1980s rock-reggae outfit Little Women to supergroup Stockholm Syndrome, and plenty more in-between, he’s amassed an enormous back catalogue and plenty of stories along the way.

What Joseph has done with The Beautiful Madness is distil all that wonder and experience, and capture it in a beautiful and moving ten-track album. And it might just be the album that finally, justifiably, makes him more well known.

Days Of Heaven opens the album and is an out and out stunner. From a brooding intro (“Surrender to the swell / I’m ready for the dying”, it explodes into life with visceral power, before Bone Towers ushers in blues guitars and some mellower introspection.

San Acacia is a rough and ready track, and it shows the kind of vocal power Joseph has as he alternates between soft, almost whispered lines, and rasping, raucous refrains, while Sugar Smacks is a beguiling, trippy seven-minute-plus spoken-word monster that rallies against a collection of the world’s greatest ills (“The real world leaves me throwing up and wishing it was done”). It’s a song that closes in around you, infects you, and leaves you thinking about it long after the final notes have faded away.

As is Dead Confederate, whose musical delicacy disguises its gravitas: written four years ago and featuring Jason Isbell on guitar, it’s a song told from the perspective of a Confederate statue being torn down. At a time when so much of America is rebelling against the celebration of its troubled past through such iconography, it’s an incredibly timely song and one that demands to be heard.

In truth, as does all of The Beautiful Madness. It’s an astonishingly powerful record, from one of music’s most powerful songwriters.

The Beautiful Madness tracklist:

1. Days Of Heaven

2. Bone Towers

3. Full Body Echo

4. San Acacia

5. (I’m In Love With) Hyrum Black

6. Good

7. Sugar Smacks

8. Dead Confederate

9. Black Star Line

10. Eureka

 country      rock 

Author: Joe Sharratt

Joe Sharratt is a writer and journalist based in the UK covering music, literature, sport, and travel.