Trippers & Askers — the recording and songwriting project of Jay Hammond — will release Tried to Do’s on May 8th via Sleepy Cat Records. The album is Hammond’s second full-length under the moniker, following 2021’s Acorn.
The project’s name is borrowed from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and its philosophy runs deep in Hammond’s work. Whitman wrote of the trippers and askers that surround us — the noise of daily life, of loss and exaltation — before insisting that these are not the essential self. That interplay between the storm of experience and the stillness at its centre feels central to Tried to Do’s, an album shaped by grief but oriented towards something more generous: the act of trying itself.
Hammond — a Georgetown professor and cultural anthropologist — initially set out to create a sequel to Acorn, a concept album built around Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. But the years between records brought a cascade of loss: the death of his grandmother, the loss of his future child, the near loss of his father-in-law, and the devastation of Hurricane Helene in his adopted hometown of Asheville, North Carolina. Faced with grief that resists explanation, Hammond turned to the teachings of spiritual and political revolutionaries across traditions — from Thich Nhat Hanh to Lama Rod Owens — as paths towards healing.
The result is an intimate song cycle grounded in everyday expressions of love and family, viewed through the prism of both Buddhist and Christian ways of mourning. Its title takes its cue from the recently deceased Black revolutionary poet Nikki Giovanni: “I really don’t think life’s about the ‘I could have been’s’ / I really think that life is all about the ‘I tried to do’s’.”
Lead track Kin offers an early window into the album’s emotional terrain. Set against Hammond’s hometown of Jackson, Tennessee, the song traces the tangled threads of family, community and the weight of cultural inheritance. It includes some prominent lines, notably the mention of Gil Scott-Heron, who faced daily racial abuse at Tigrett Middle School (he was one of only three black children chosen to desegregate the institution1). “Her husband John went to Tigrett Middle, where they bused Gil Scott in, he didn’t know that Gil Scott-Heron was who he was, But no one asks ‘whose Carl Perkins?,’ Blue Suede is in our blood.” The song’s recurring address to “all of your kin” carries a double weight: a Southern courtesy and a far deeper reckoning.
Tried to Do’s was recorded across sessions in Durham, NC and Brooklyn, NY, and features a formidable cast of collaborators including Andy Stack (Wye Oak, Lambchop), Joe Westerlund, Libby Rodenbough, Casey Toll (Nathan Bowles), Stephanie Coleman (Nora Brown), and Joseph Decosimo, among others. The cover art was created by songwriter Will Stratton.
Hammond has previously played with No Lands, Eamon Fogarty, and Psychic Temple, but Tried to Do’s stands as his most personal work to date — a record that, in turbulent times, offers something increasingly rare: space to breathe, reflect, and feel grounded.
Pre-Order Tried to Do’s: https://trippers-and-askers.bandcamp.com/album/tried-to-dos-2