What are you to think when what you've written about as an observer becomes your life?
For 15 years, Damien Jurado has traced the twisted heartstrings of the dissolute and disaffected as they struggle to make meaning of their broken relations. His songs are populated by cuckolds and cheaters, haunted souls and numbed nomads looking for a way back home, all keyed to a dreamy folk strum.
But Jurado himself was a happy guy who once told an interviewer that after playing with his kid and watching Teletubbies the last thing he wanted to do was write an upbeat song.
"It's just weird because you spend 10 years of your music career not singing about you and not relating—we're talking, like, not even relating to any of the things you're singing about, and then all of a sudden you do relate to them. You're just like, 'Wow, it's a real problem,' then you start thinking like, 'Was all this a self-fulfilling prophecy?' " Jurado says. "It's not, because who the hell wants divorce? My life was really awesome during those years that I was married. They were great, and then something went wrong, and that was it. It's not something anybody calls on."
The dam burst right as Jurado went on tour to support 2006's And Now That I'm in Your Shadow. When he returned home to work on the next album, it took longer than usual. Jurado has always shied from the confessional. ("I never saw the point of it," he says. "There are some things that are private.") But he didn't realize he'd moved in front the lens after so long behind it.
"I didn't understand those songs were really about me until I started singing in a studio," he says. " 'Dimes' was one in particular where I did the vocal and it was like, 'Wow, this is about me.'"
The song features a guy with dozens of dimes, making hang-up calls to the opposite number in a love triangle, and concludes with the question, "What happens now, when it all goes down?" It's one of several harrowing songs on last year's Caught in the Trees, including the self-conscious/referential "Coats of Ice," and "Sheets," where Jurado complains, "Lord knows I don't want to compete but still I sleep in the very same sheets he's been in."
While the songs were personal, Jurado quips that he didn't feel exposed singing them because people had already assumed for years that his songs were about him. The tough part came when he parted ways with his bandmates, Eric Fisher and Jenna Conrad.
"These aren't just random people I play music with, these are two of my best friends. So to tell them, 'I can't afford to play with you guys anymore,' after this record just came out and after I was in the press saying, 'Oh yeah, we're a band,' it's totally heartbreaking," he says. "I was starting to feel like, 'Wow, I've lost so many things.' "
On the bright side, touring solo has allowed him to quit his day job teaching preschoolers, and shortly before last year's tour he remarried, setting his life back on the sunny path. He's started a project with his brother, called Hoquiam, and has already written several songs for a new solo album. But don't expect more confessionals, now that his life's back on track. "I made my way through it and now I'm writing different songs," he says.
