James Jeffrey-West on Acoustic Conversations

The great thing about the vast major­ity of musi­cians is that they are at the same time gra­cious and gen­er­ous peo­ple, and hun­gry for atten­tion. That means, if you point a micro­phone at them and turn on a lit­tle red light, by-in-large, they start singing.

So it was when Curt and I started Acoustic Con­ver­sa­tions a few years back. The first show was a con­vo­luted mix of stun­ning fla­menco riffs lov­ingly gifted to us by our good friend John Carl­son and poorly mic’d wannabe talk radio. Still, that con­ver­sa­tion sparked some­thing cool, and posted a stitch in time that leads to today, the last show of our sec­ond sea­son, and our newest addi­tion to the fam­ily, James Jeffrey-West.

James is a stun­ningly warm per­son. I say that as a point of con­trast, I think. He’s a con­trast to jok­ers who try to own a room with ego and pomp; he’s a con­trast to yahoos who enter a room with joke­ster hip­pery; he’s a con­trast to croon­ers who slide into a room with sticky smug insin­cer­ity. When James came into the AC lounge, well, we wanted to give him a hug.

In his bio, James says he plays “good, hon­est acoustic” music. Inso­far as we couldn’t see the allu­sion when we kicked off the inter­view, we were wrapped up in it by the end. His songs are grace­fully sim­ple pack­ages, easy on the ear and dif­fi­cult to shake. His song-writing is at once worldly and approach­able; he weaves his broad life expe­ri­ence into tales that are most often too short to be com­pletely sat­is­fy­ing.

We talked a lot in this show. So much, in fact, that we didn’t actu­ally get to all the music that we’d intended. It’s a shame, too, because for my money, the best tracks of the evening were those recorded after the show had ended. Take a spe­cial lis­ten to Sacra­mento Inter­na­tional, a haunt­ing lul­laby to con­gested air travel; and Half a World Away, an anthem to bifur­cated love in tick­lish har­mon­ics. You’ll find the show, as well as all six of the tracks we recorded with James avail­able free in iTunes. Please sub­scribe to sup­port the show.

I deeply hope you enjoy the music of James Jeffrey-West. He’s a new favorite of ours and we’re thrilled to bring him to the show. As ever, com­ments wel­come, but mostly, just go buy his CD. It’s in iTunes, CDBaby, and just about every­where else music is served.