Description
This is a pre-order. It will ship on or around 11/13/26
New! Coke New! Coke is Jeffrey Joe Jensen trying to figure out where he came from, where he belongs, and why the hell the world is the way it is. He doesn't have the answers, but he has some pretty good songs.
Jensen didn’t set out to make a concept album. He simply wanted to write honestly about his life, particularly the years since he left the United States in 2013. Somewhere along the way, New! Coke New! Coke became a record about dislocation, survival, love, faith, wonder, and his increasingly complicated relationship with America.
Recorded across seven studios in Brooklyn and Philmont, New York; Longmeadow, Massachusetts; Nairobi, Kenya; Cairo, Egypt; and Galloway, New Jersey, New! Coke New! Coke is as geographically scattered as the musicians who made it. The album grew out of a collaboration with Michael Fellows, best known as a member of the influential D.C. punk band Rites of Spring, who recorded much of the album at his home studio in Philmont. Other sessions took place in Nairobi with Kenyan musicians from the Luo community, while a brief but mesmerizing cameo from Alvarius B., aka Alan Bishop of Sun City Girls, was recorded in Cairo. The far-flung cast reflects Jensen's decade abroad and his changing relationship with America, while the record itself refuses to separate music from the world around it.
Jensen is hardly new to creative mischief. His previous exploits include the cult pseudo-documentary The Low-Down Dirty DAWGS, prank-phone duo Earles & Jensen, and the pop duo The Special Moments. New! Coke New! Coke turns that same restless, off-kilter sensibility toward songwriting.
After spending roughly a decade living outside the United States, primarily in the West Indies, Egypt, and Kenya, Jensen returned home with the peculiar sensation of an anthropologist studying his own tribe. The underground culture he had once considered home had become strangely foreign. Romantic upheavals, loneliness, encounters with spirituality, deaths and disappearances, and the accumulated absurdity of simply being alive all found their way into the songs.
So did a songwriting method that sounds like something between numerology, the early-'70s novel The Dice Man, and a particularly deranged reinterpretation of American Top 40.
On the first day of recording, with no songs ready to go, Jensen asked Fellows to pick a decade, a year, a month, a day, and finally a number. The result was October 14, 1972, and the No. 33 song on that week's chart: “Loving You Just Crossed My Mind” by obscure country-pop singer Sam Neely.
Jensen had never heard it. He found it “ponderous and forgettable. Worse than Dan Fogelberg.” But he borrowed a couple of chords, adapted the title, and found his way into a song. He ultimately used the same accidental process on at least half the record.
“The rest,” he says, “I just dragged out of the river.”
That collision of sincerity and absurdity is central to New! Coke New! Coke. Jensen is interested in the place where the joke and the heartfelt confession become indistinguishable. The songs move freely between love, spirituality, technological dread, mythology, memory, and outright weirdness, populated by a singular pantheon of saints including Herbert Huncke, Darby Crash, Hamish Kilgour, Queen Nanny, and Ernie K-Doe. “The Swimmer,” “Blackstar Blues,” and the title track wrestle with dislocation and unstable belonging; “Take the Child to the Moon,” “Honey’s Rising,” and “There’s Still Love (in Old San Francisco)” find hope and wonder in the wreckage; while “425 Park Avenue” brings together New York, the Black Moon, and the encroaching technological singularity.
The stories behind the songs are no less strange. “Honey's Rising” concerns a dog Jensen and his father adopted after his parents' divorce who escaped through an open gate and was never seen again. “Loving You Has Just Crossed My Mind” partly recalls an incident in which, after being shot as a teenager, Jensen asked the paramedics whether the Kansas City Royals had won. “The Swimmer” is a retelling of a friend’s spectacular psychological misadventure in Jamaica involving marijuana, a swimming pool, a spear gun, a roof, a water tank, an attempted escape from a moving van transporting him to a police station, and several days recovering in his parents' bed.
For all its darkness and dislocation, New! Coke New! Coke is ultimately a hopeful record. Jensen makes no claim to strict autobiography. Memory, hallucination, mythology, exaggeration, and absurdity are deliberately blurred. He wants listeners to find love, curiosity, amusement, and perhaps a little productive discomfort.What matters most is the emotional truth.
As for the artist whose career he would most like to emulate, the answer is immediate:
“My idol is Jonathan Richman.”
