When Damien Jurado toured his new album, The Horizon Just Laughed, he did so while wearing a variety of plain-color jumpsuits that were less Devo and more “I work in a factory.” Appropriate, anyway, as he’s been working like a factory worker for over twenty years now, steadily releasing album after album of hopelessly reliable nylon-string folk-rock that you could set your watch to. Good old fashioned American craftsmanship. Or something like that. Jurado’s music has been frequently taken for granted over time—it seems as if each album is warmly received and then moved on from—and that’s likely partially due to the fact that, from a distance, it can sound similar to what one might call modern mood music. It’s much more than that, of course, but a playful awareness of that perception is part of what makes “Percy Faith” one of Jurado’s best-ever written songs, it being named after the inventor of mood music, Mr. Percy Faith. The time-travelling saga is almost epistolary in nature—we’re dropped into the middle of what appears to be a letter directed at various semi-forgotten entertainers like Faith, Ray Conniff, and Allan Sherman—but “Stan” this is not. Jurado’s world is dreamy, sure, and you might not notice it at first, but the assembly line catches up to everyone eventually
Damien Jurado, “Percy Faith” from the album “The Horizon Just Laughed” out May 4, 2018 on Secretly Canadian
The Fat Angel Sings 