To understand how Jaye Jayle arrived at the way station of their forthcoming album, Don’t Let Your Love Life Let You Down, you must first trace the trail back to the project’s modest beginnings. The earliest Jaye Jayle releases were 45s housed in dust jackets—the kind of relics you would expect to find shoved in milk crates at the back of vintage record stores. Etched into their grooves you’d find a sparse and cryptic spin on American roots music; across the first two Jaye Jayle albums—House Cricks and Other Excuses to Get Out (2016) and No Trail and Other Unholy Paths (2018)—Patterson expanded the parameters of his sound. If you listened closely, you could hear the echoes of their home, Louisville, in the songs. There was the tension and dynamics of Slint, the hushed songwriting of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, and the repetitious minimalism of The Shipping News, yet it somehow didn’t seem tethered to any clear tradition. The big sea change came with Prisyn (2020). A portmanteau of prison and synthetic, Prisyn was a deliberate departure from his previous work’s organic nature and an embrace of the personal isolation that set in with the pandemic. For Don’t Let Your Love Life Get You Down, Patterson returned the full-band approach while taking the crucial lessons he learned from working on Prisyn.
It was a gradual and uncertain process, but Patterson was in a much different headspace than he’d been in the past, having come out on the other side of a dissolved marriage and a long period of instability and uncertainty. “I found peace in being accepting of the change,” he says. That openness and vulnerability shaped the music and tapped into something that no previous Jaye Jayle album has attained. “I wanted the songs to feel ‘devastatingly hopeful’… this is absolutely the most emotionally straightforward album I have made.”
A sense of adversity and redemption can be heard across the album— from the odes to intimacy and unfortunate incompatibilities of first single “Black Diamonds and Bad Apples,” which premieres today— Don’t Let Your Love Life Get You Down conjures an aura of psychedelic grace and enveloping warmth through its pairing of pensive baritone poetics and gospel-infused blues. Of the single, Patterson comments: “I’ve been doing a lot of self-work since the pandemic. It was a trying time for everyone to say the least. To make the choice of where and how to focus my powers, to be selfless and understanding, and to equally be capable of taking care of myself as well as others. It’s a simple song about a very difficult and complex time in my life. It’s a song about excepting my recent divorce and the commitment of forever-love regardless of the separation.”
Across the eight songs of Don’t Let Your Love Life Get You Down, Patterson and his cohorts take the old American singer-songwriter template and imbue it with a kaleidoscope of sonic textures culled from a half-century’s worth of fringe music. One of the most critical contributors to Jaye Jayle’s multi-dimensional sound comes from producer/multi-instrumentalist Ben Chisholm (Chelsea Wolfe), who was brought into the fold to mix the album. “Ben and I made Prisyn together and I have had one of my favorite musical relationships of my life since then. I consider him the secret member of the band at this point,” Patterson says. “Ben’s ideas are modern and saturated with layers of sonic color. I always describe his mixing as plush, like a velvet landscape. He is a genius to my ears.”
This aural grandeur reinforces the life-affirming radiance of Don’t Let Your Love Life Get You Down. Though Jaye Jayle retains the hypnotic repetition and austere instrumentation of their past, the added layers and saturation of sound intensifies the hallucinatory spirit and synesthesia delights only previously hinted at in their work. As with all Jaye Jayle records, it’s still best suited for the hours after midnight, but it now holds the promise of dawn.
Don’t Let Your Love Life Get You Down will be out on July 14th and is available for pre-order here. See Jaye Jayle on the road in select markets following the album’s release and look for more news to surface soon.
Jaye Jayle, on tour:
July 25 Birmingham, AL @ Saturn *
July 26 Atlanta, GA @ The Earl *
July 27 Nashville, TN @ DRKMTTR *
July 28 Louisville, KY @ Planet of the Tapes *
July 29 Hammond, IN @ Paul Henry’s Art Gallery
July 30 Chicago, IL @ Beat Kitchen *
* w/ Kowloon Walled City
