Lyons Bluesologist, Daid McInytre
Inspired by Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven,” Big Black Birds is about the conversations between Jami and the black birds that followed her all over Colorado, California, Thailand, and Indonesia while she was writing this album.
The album is built from her experience as an alt-country troubadour, weaving tales of travel, self-realization and death.
I have known and worked with Jami over the past three years, it seems she has been working on this project from the first time I met her. Also from the get go, I realized she was on a journey and that journey included her songs and experiences and everything life was throwing her way. She is a take-charge kind of gal and she creates good results on her journey. She is a force on stage with her strong and driving Gibson guitars and soft yet powerful voice that surrounds the lyrics and propels her songs across to the audience. Her songs are poems full of imagery and wonder, as in the title cut, “as the Black Birds fly by as she is losing her mind, they steal her sunshine but collect all her water and love her like a daughter.”
The recurring Black birds seem to oversee her life and keep her company on her journey through time and gray skies that she sees outside the rounded windows of her vintage 1966 Airstream.
Her first album, released in 2003, “Butterfly With Broken Wings,” featured the song “Porter County Line.” Co-written with Stacey Earle, it paved the way for Jami to end up sharing many stages along the way with the likes of Shawn Colvin, Drew Emmitt, James McMurty, John Gorka, Kathleen Edwards, Chatham County Line, and more.
Jami grew up in a very musical family in Northern Indiana where her mother ran and booked a folk music venue. There were guitars left out from the night before. Mandolins, banjos, and broken strings were strewn about the house. She was fed on a steady diet of Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, The Rolling Stones, Emmy Lou Harris, and even New Grass Revival (a house favorite).
Jami got her first guitar and a handful of lessons at eight years old. She’d later sell it to go on tour with the Grateful Dead in her teen years, but she never forgot how to play it. She moved to Winter Park, Colorado when she was 20 years old and fell in love with a bass player who had a guitar lying around his house. That felt right to her. She married the bass player. Jami started playing his guitar and started writing her own songs.
In 2007 after the death of one of her closest friends who died on his thirty first birthday, and the loss of her marriage, Jami moved to Venice, California. She then traveled through Thailand and Indonesia solo for a few months before finally landing, in the summer of 2008, in Lyons and Oskar Blues.
She was a huge help to me, as she understood musicians better than most co-workers ever could, and put together our wildly successful monthly musical tributes, and still does, through her Awnry Girl Productions.
Big Black Birds is chock full of extremely talented musicians from Lyons: Eben Grace, Brain Schey, Greg McRae, Todd Livingston (ex-Lyonite) as well as Jack Leahy, Ian Morlock and The Great Chris Funk from The Decemberists.
This album builds and builds and builds, it is a piece of work that grows on you each time you listen to it. Which in my opinion, is the real sign of a truly great piece of music. You will hear something new that you missed with each listen. Either a lyric you didn’t catch first listen or a riff that hits you right between the eyes.
Come to Oskar Blues Lyons on Sunday, July 10, 6 to 9 p.m .and pick up a copy of this CD and enjoy a beautiful evening of musical bliss.
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