Confessional and intimately sung and played on acoustic and classical guitar with occasional electric from Jon Neufeld, Jeffrey Martin’s ‘Thank God We Left The Garden’ is stripped-back folk Americana that mines introspective regrets and matters of faith and meaning.
Mortality and transience inform Lost Dog (“I’ll be dead in a moment, just a breath and I’ll be gone/Love is everything that can’t be held for too long”) with its feelings of anxiety (“looking back over my shoulder for the headlight’s glow”) and being lost in the darkness (“You see me now Daddy I am a vapor of a ghost/Out spinning in the blackness where the time doesn’t go”). At the same time, the reference to a tree leads into the Adam and Eve referencing, Eden-based Garden with its need for knowledge and assurance (“I want to know the secrets/I want to peek behind the curtain/I want to find out for certain/If I’m here on purpose”), self-discovery and calm (“In my mind, there’s a garden/Full of beauty and darkness/Full of sorrow and sweet things/Where my heart can be honest”), but doubtful of salvation (“As if knowing would save me/From the things that have made me/As if the mess that I’m making/Isn’t really a blessing”).
That same existential angst troubles Quiet Man with those “holes in all our bibles where we make secret compartments/To hide the broken treasures we smuggled out of the garden” as “We gaze at our reflections like insecure children/Poorly dressed and always panicking in the bodies of men and women/And we stumble on like drunkards toward a cliff just because/None of us cares about the end when we’re trying to find love”. Life it seems is full of deception (“the gold crowns have been found out to be brass that has been painted”) and disappointment (“Some of us get lucky, find an anchor in the storm/Some of us never learn to see beyond the place we were born”), where “Time is a mystic with a briefcase in his hand/You can pay to look inside it but you can’t afford to understand” and faith is just another conceit (“You can meet God in a cigarette just the same as in a sermon”) as it ends with the cautionary chilling, “the Devil’s always listening to those who are deserving”.
Memories of younger years cast their spell over the fictional Red Station Wagon; as the electric guitar slips in towards the end, the narrator speaks of a teenage friend struggling with their sexual identity (“you said that you might be afraid of who you really are/Your hand touched my hand and retreated in that desperate dark/And I called you a faggot and laughed and punched you in the arm”), of the rejection by a supposed Christian society (“The church was a boot on your neck since the day you were born/They didn’t like the way that you talk or how you move in the world…The world wants a man who is hard not hard to define”) with its heartbreaking line “you feel like a child that the God of all forgot to name/Like he gave you a heart but He did not give you a place… Did He breathe into you just to tell you that you are to blame?” and the consuming guilt of “I can’t believe how I let you down”.
A shade of John Prine arrives for Paper Crown with its perhaps comforting observation that “Everybody feels the same way/Everybody’s too afraid to say/What they haven’t found” as they “Get up and go to work in their darkness/Come home and try to hold onto to something/It’s a wheel that goes around”. Yet, it opens out into optimism (“It’s a quiet kind of singing/It is moving without moving/And I am not worried/About where I’m going”) that spills over into the, even more, Prine-like There Is A Treasure with its quiet acceptance of the flow and cycle of life (“The city will still be moving in the morning/A million lives all breathing like a tide/Each one a story beyond our comprehending/Each trying to make a life and feel alive”) where “The trees will bloom down along the river/The kids will race the fountains in the light/Someone will cry and pray that it gets better/Someone will stop and try to change a life” and that, while we may be ultimately an insignificant part of the fabric, “The sun will rise like it always does/On the day that I die/The world will spin, the sun will go on burning/Never even knowing I was alive”. Accepting this, he suggests, will give us a kind of peace, “a place beyond the measure of our minds/It is where we go when we forget we’re living/It is where we go when we forget we die…a place we don’t have words to describe”.
The contemplative strummed pastoral sway of All My Love speaks of connection (“when I’m with you all my questions they feel like the answer”) while Daylight conjures Dylan in its lyrics of feeling lost and with no direction home (“Standing alone with a ticket in my hand/I paid all my money to be here/That’s why it’s taken me so damn long/To ask for the help to leave here/How I imagine never comes to fruition/I’ve got volumes of stories to spin here/And my best dreams are only a sad imitation/Of the mystery that cannot be seen here”), doubting himself (“I’m a scoundrel at best/All the things that I’ve kept/Are from those who’ve already been here/And the words that I write were first written by them/Still I claim to have something to say here”) as he again returns to the metaphor of the garden and the fruit of the tree as we hope to find reason and meaning, seeking “a glimpse of the sun”.
World-wearily strummed, I Didn’t Know tells the story of a broken home from the child’s perspective (“I grew up in a brick house on 15th behind the bakery/Where my dad worked his bones into knots/My mom was a watcher, my mom was a listener/My mom was afraid to leave the house…I hear mom and dad fighting, the busted oven and then they’re laughing/And she’s chasing him down the hallway with a towel/I didn’t know that they didn’t know what they were doing”), of tragedy (“I woke to the sound of sadness and tiptoed out the bedroom/To find dad crying at the window by the phone/In the morning I had not forgotten and the whole house felt different…Mom said his sister was a drinker and they tried everything to help her/But sometimes a story has already been told”) and how that impacts his own fatalistic fears (“I laid in bed wondering what was already written/And who gets to decide where I go?”).
Contrasting the ache of sorrow there, Sculptor may be rooted in loss (“I miss your breath on my shoulders”), but is nevertheless a love song of ineffable melancholic beauty about living life as best we can while we can (“Swing away until the sun goes/Trade your soul for a photo/And stories that we all know/Are empty in the end”) with the wonderfully poetic line “sadness is a blanket/A comfort in the chains/I wear when I am hopeless/And too afraid to change”.
It ends with Walking, another reflection on mortality and the fleeting nature of our time (“The violent sounds of busy streets/People living at all cost/Die away eventually/If you stay up late enough”) and that “we’ll be gone with nothing/The same way that we came”, yet finding peace going out walking the empty streets when “The dogs are gone to dream…The rain has come and gone again/The air is close and soft”, hearing the sound of a far off song and where “Shadows have kind faces/They are waltzing with the trees”.
Talking about the album, Martin, also the son of a pastor, muses: “It’s always bothered me how uptight religion gets around the messiness of our human natures, always trying to tell people they’re broken and flawed from the get-go. The only God I can imagine is one who is overjoyed with the mess. Who revels in the edgeless mystery. I imagine hanging around with angels all day gets boring pretty fast. So maybe we got the story wrong. Maybe we were supposed to leave the Garden all along. Maybe that was the first good thing we ever did. After all, I can’t think of anything that has an ounce of meaning or dimension that doesn’t come from failure.”
With statements like that, it’s unsurprising that the songs throughout Thank God We Left The Garden are written with such honesty, depth, wisdom, and insight.
Bandcamp: https://jeffreymartinportland.bandcamp.com/album/thank-god-we-left-the-garden