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“I was raised on blues and soul music. When I look at the core of myself, my name is Luther and I’m a 68-year-old black guy with one green eye and a couple gold teeth and I play harmonica in a blues band that plays at a dump in the ghetto. Nobody comes to the gigs, and I’ll have played there my whole life—like, five days a week my band plays there. One night, Keith Richards is in town and he comes in and jams with me. Word gets around and someone recorded it and then that record gets released, and I die the day before it gets released. When it’s released, it’s the biggest blues hit since Stevie Ray Vaughan. On the inside, that’s what I look like.”
Justin Jones is “rock and roll….No Auto-Tune, no gimmicks—just a songwriter with a guitar and a crack band,” says The Vinyl District’s Jennifer Carney. With a musical career that spans more than a decade, Virginia native Justin Jones is taking his soul-stirring brand of rock and roll on the road for his I Can Feel It Tour 2013 of the U.S.
Weaned on the sounds of southern soul, blues, and rock, Jones started playing open mic nights in Charlottesville near his hometown in his early teens. His first album, Blue Dreams - recorded in 2004, is the cornerstone of what turns out to be this prolific singer-songwriter’s catalog of albums, including Love Versus Heroin, I Am the Song of the Drunkards, and The Little Fox, that express both the lows and highs of love and life. “The songs I write and the music my band and I play, in my mind, is quintessentially American… It lives and breathes in the landscape that is America… sometimes soulful and sometimes stark… sometimes hard and sometimes lush. I like to think I write beautiful songs about death, sad songs about love, and hopeful songs about life. What I consider a kind of secular spiritual music.” Fading Light, Justin’s fifth album, was released in 2012. Produced by Jamie Candiloro, best known for his work with Ryan Adams and R.E.M., Fading Light is a collection of songs written over a two-year stretch.
In 2012, Jones took his emotionally charged live show on the road. His busiest tour to date, Jones and his band played 130 shows across North America, including stops at Virgin Mobile Festival, Floyd Festival, and the Austin City Limits Music Festival (ACL). It is no wonder Speakers in Code names Justin Jones one of the top-ten performances at ACL 2012, and Bob Boilen of NPR’s All Songs Considered lists Justin Jones “as one of the top performances of the year.” And all signs point to Justin Jones surpassing this momentum in 2013, with a new album and documentary on the way, an upcoming U.S. tour, and talk of a European debut.
…Years later, that story continues with Young Life, the third album by Long Arms. James formed the band in his hometown of Richmond, Virginia, eventually cementing a four-piece lineup around lead guitarist Phil Heesen III, drummer Greg Butler, and bassist Alex Smith. Together, the musicians whipped up a sound rooted in electric guitars and vocal hooks — a sound built for open highways, car dashboards, and barroom stages. Young Life is the sharpest version of that sound, delivering a batch of songs trapped halfway bewteen the rule-breaking spirit of James’ teenage punk days and the epic sweep of electric rock & roll.
It’s also an album about what it means to be a rock & roll lifer.
“I think the songs represent the struggle with trying to stay young and innocent at heart in the face of a constantly evolving world that places excessive and unrealistic demands on us,” says James. “And in the process, we forget what truly matters. Life, love, friendship. Music. The easy, wonderful things that we end up second guessing as we get older, because we are taught to leave those behind, that there’s no place for them. And along with trying to hold on to the freedom and innocence comes loneliness and isolation, as the reality sets in that staying true to these ideals becomes harder and harder, as outside forces try to strip these things from us…technology, anxiety, depression, our own self doubts, and life in the modern world.”
James wrote much of the album alone, during a string of late-night trips to the band’s rehearsal space in downtown Richmond. There, while the rest of the city slept, he turned up his amp and workshopped new songs on the electric guitar, falling in love with the instrument all over again. In doing so, he rediscovered the same excitement he’d felt years earlier, back when the process of writing an album was still new. The punky teenage angst was gone, and in its place had grown something deeper — a longtime appreciation for the spark and swagger of loud, live music.
To record Young Life, Long Arms headed into the foothills of the Appalachian mountains and booked a week’s worth of sessions at White Star Studio with producer Stewert Myers. They captured the basic tracks live, shining a light on a band whose stage show has earned them opening gigs with Tommy Stinson, Evan Dando, and others. Later, they put the finishing touches on Young Life’s 12 songs in Richmond’s Montrose Recording and Audio Verité.
Stocked with literary references to Faulkner, Kerouac and Salinger, Young Life is a rallying cry from a band of rock & roll lifers who, in the spirit of their influences, are still flying the flag for art that’s pure, punchy and personal. It’s big music for big places. It’s Long Arms at their best. “