James H Jewell III
James Jewell's background
James H Jewell is a Singer-songwriter, furniture maker, and poet. Pennsylvania born he now is living in Chicago. In between he and his wife have lived in Nashville, Los Angeles, Toronto, and Paris. His songs reflect a very homegrown Pennsylvania feeling while telling stories of travel, adventures, struggles, and trials of a vagabond lifestyle. He's recorded and played with musicians everywhere he's gone and has a beautiful collection of songs and recordings to show for it. His third record is "Songs From the Fridge” which was recorded in Paris France with one of Ray Charles’s engineers Steven Forward. It features musicians from Pennsylvania, Seattle, Paris, and Nashville.
here's a link to James's third record, Songs From the Fridge, by James Hyland Jewell
Spotify
https://open.spotify.com/artist/2f2i28c90QEWInt33LvFrB
youtube
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB2iOETtH9PgIbjX4Qv3gEA
https://www.facebook.com/JamesHylandJewell
Reviews of "songs from the fridge"
Americana Highways
This album is classic sounding folk songs, simply delivered by James on acoustic guitar, with high class accompaniment in simple bare bones style arrangements. Recorded in a stone castle full of refrigerated cars produced an austere and spacious aura behind the songs and their sounds.
https://americanahighways.org/2024/04/22/review-wahb-greenfield-pub/
Kurt Wagner of Lambchop (the band)
This stuff is great. I listened to the whole record twice and it sounds awesome pre mastered and all.
You have such a great unique thing going on and it keeps getting better. Bits of polecat and Prine, but the main thing is how you use your voice; it's pure and wildly unpredictable.
Great recordings.
Don Botch (Reading Eagle)
In the Beatles-esque “Grandmotherʼs Garden,” Jewellʼs late grandmotherʼs garden down the shore, which he helped tend in her twilight years, becomes a metaphor for time slipping away. “Now you know that the garden/It dies once a year/But I know that my grandma/Will always be there” sings the poet, before his acoustic guitar and Caroline Gloryʼs exquisitely mournful cello fade to silence.
Glory, a member of lʼOrchestre de Paris, isnʼt the only contributor to the new CD. Jewell also called upon some local connections – the aforementioned Henry, bassist David Harborfield and vocalist Heidi Faust – and some “hotshots” heʼs met in his travels – vocalist Dana Thompson, pedal-steel master Paul Niehaus (Calexico, Yo La Tengo, Lambchop, etc.) and pianist Simon Cloquet-Lafollye.
Reviews of "Instruments And Controls"
Comes With A Smile
.......the record skirts all kinds of genres and forms in-between. But it's two tracks, really, that mark this out from the regular batch of alt.country almost-rans. Flying Away is the first and it's almost too good. A strummed acoustic guitar gives way to a breathy, rushed vocal, "The frost is killing the strawberry fields as I board the plane to London / And like a circus man in a high wire act I get the shudders all of a sudden" he sings and you're drawn in instantly, Jewell sputtering the words out of his mouth as if the hounds of hell were yapping at his ankles. It's fantastic, sounding like an outtake from early Springsteen it's the best thing on this album and one of the songs of the year.
Stav Sherez - CWS - full review: https://cwas.hinah.com/webexclusive/?id=126
A Green Man Review
... in a world of prefabricated pop and by-the-numbers balladry, James Jewell and Shew are unabashedly original. - Highly recommended. full review: https://agreenmanreview.com/music-2/james-jewell-and-shews-wasted-and-instruments-and-controls/
Review of "wasted"
A Green Man Review
Wasted is a wildly original debut. The songs, most of which have one-word titles like “Lost,” “Colors,” “Uphill,” “Rely,” and “Wasted,” are little poetic gems with oddly metered lyrics like “Everybody’s lost, and all hope is gone,” “Where does the wind blow us when our time is through?” and “You said that I think too much/But all I’ve got’s in my head.”
The melodies are simple and catchy, the rhythm strong and deliberate, and the vocals up front over very sparse instrumentation. The opening track, “Lost,” sets the tone perfectly. In just one song are echoes of the Holy Modal Rounders’ surrealistic folk, the Meat Puppets’ off-kilter harmonies, Lambchop’s country-lounge vibe, even Leonard Cohen’s existential despair. “I can’t see with my eyes, I can’t hear with my nose/but I
can smell everything with my heart and I keep my mouth closed.”
Wasted is one of the most consistently entertaining CDs I’ve encountered in a long while.
Book of poetry: "Ships made of fake fur"
Sabotage Reviews
James Jewell’s Ships Made of Fur:
A singer-songwriter, originally from Pennsylvania, Jewell’s poetry seems more openly conversational, comic and, in parts, verbose. The chapbook consists of prose poems, odes, observational sketches and short lyrics, and in this it is more obviously eclectic than Reid’s.
It is anchored in modern life (the ‘ships’ of the title are, in fact, people roaming a cityscape: ‘The floundering ships / made of fake fur are floating / through the coffee shops, / restaurants and cinemas of Amsterdam’), and Jewell is clearly most comfortable in the realm of the colloquial and the comic. He has the comedian’s ability to draw acute examples from the everyday, bringing out the oddities of chance encounters, making them both poignant and light-hearted by turns. The best of these little sketches is ‘Three Beards’:
Homesick,
standing in a semi circle.
Three beards of different lengths
and one without a beard,
looking at each other,
fondly,
curiously.
“My boyfriend had a beard as long as yours.”
She shows us pictures.
In these few lines, Jewell manages to pack a mass of suggestion and curiosity with an unassuming ease. There is the sense of competition between the men, brought out by the way the girl trumps the other three with her boyfriend’s superior facial hair, there is the sense of separation (the girl from her boyfriend, who is featured in the past tense; the three men from home etc.), and the small hints of friendship and kinship between the ‘three beards’. The final image of the photographs confirms this collective yearning for an elsewhere. Jewell finds the casual, everyday emotion in such encounters, skilfully working it into his verse in a way that is both unobtrusive and effective.
He spins thought-provoking tales, featuring characters as diverse as Bob Marley, Napoleon and the Cookie Monster, but always keeps the emotional core of the poem visible beneath these comic layers. Jewell’s poetry avoids abstraction by cutting close to the issue at hand without revealing it explicitly, and this is where his talent lies. He has the ability to situate his reader, he talks to them not from the poet’s ‘imagined height’ but eye-to-eye, and it is on this common ground that we are able to relate to him, and feel the humorous sentiment of his sketches.
-Reviewed by Seán Hewitt– find review here: https://sabotagereviews.com/2012/09/10/corruptpress/
Available at: https://corruptpress.com/books/shipfur.shtml
