Jesse Terry - When We Wander (Album Review)

Jesse Terry is the kind of musician you could happily take home to meet your folks, safe in the knowledge that your imminent engagement would get their full endorsement.  Your mother would ask, flushed, “is he too good to be true?”  I don’t think there is anyone quite as clean-cut as Jesse Terry in the whole wide world of Americana.  It’s just a pity for all you singletons that he is already married (to wife Jess – Jess, I know!) and has a young daughter.  Unsurprisingly, then, family is at this record’s heart, as Jesse and Jess were raising their child on tour until being forced off the road by the pandemic.  It’s the first time Terry has properly pulled over in a decade, having been a full-time troubadour with Jess by his side since 2010.   

The new ways (as I call them) have meant that self-releasing artists like Jesse Terry, who previously made a living through playing shows, have had to build and fully embrace their online community.  Terry has made both a success and a pleasure of this, saying “livestream concerts have become the highlight of my week”.  This is clearly true for his fans too, as they have come through for him, playing their part to back the release.  And you don’t make a record as beautiful as this on a shoestring budget.  With Neilson Hubbard in the production chair (and at the drum stool) and a wealth of world-class bandmates, Terry has created possibly the most luxurious sounding record of his career to date.  That is really saying something when you go back and listen to 2017’s critically acclaimed and ambitious Stargazer.  The key difference here is that Terry recorded When We Wander live in studio, with the focus on, as he puts it, “prioritizing emotion and raw performances over perfection”.  While the sound is still slicker than oil on a black polished marble floor, you can really feel that human interaction; you can hear the room. 

The virtues of an itinerant lifestyle are celebrated in opener ‘When We Wander’, which is announced by CSN&Y chiming chords and is slathered in Josh Kaler’s dreamy pedal steel.  Terry’s low and intimate vocal delivery here put me in mind of fellow singer-songwriter Kevin Montgomery and this similarity continues in the freewheeling, Jackson Browne vibe of current single ‘Strangers in Our Town’.  There are more wide-smiling country-rock toetappers in the form of ‘Hanging the Stars’ and the life-affirming ‘Pretty Good Hand’ but the record is punctuated by more vulnerable, reflective pieces like the wonderful ‘Ghost Stories’ and the tissues-at-the-ready lullaby ‘If I Were The Moon’.  These more delicate moments are especially rewarding and showcase the versatility of the players, with special mention going here to viola/violinist Eamon McLoughlin, whose talents are firmly threaded through the whole LP.   

Standout track ‘Little Fires’, with its wide, haunting arrangement gives more space to Terry’s raw emotion and some of the Nashville tropes, which are in danger of suffocating the album at points, are given a welcome rest.  The overly earnest ‘Is There an Answer’ is atoned for in the much more effective brooding of ‘In Spite Of You’, which in turn feeds perfectly into the brilliantly Tom Pettyish ‘Innocent Ones’.  The country waltz of ‘Just Out Of Your Sight’ closes proceedings, neatly adorned with Will Kimbrough’s mandolin. 

Despite When We Wander being blessed with Americana’s finest musicians, Terry is possibly at his best when pushing himself out from under their drapery of riches and stepping back from those genre conventions. Nevertheless, together with Hubbard, Jesse Terry has made a record that is exquisitely played, sincerely felt and sonically beautiful.  They have made the kind of record that thousands of singer-songwriters dream of making.  A record that is almost too good to be true.

Review by Rich Barnard