By Arran Fagan
Looming over six feet, with a gristly beard, a deep bellowing voice, and piercing eyes, Jeffrey Martin looks like the quintessential illustration of a man. His music falls within that narrative, begging the question, “What makes a man?” Jeffrey has spent the better half of his life working hard jobs and traveling around the country playing music in all sorts of venues. Jeffrey started out playing music with the hopes of fame, his music forever encapsulated in history. The road was hard, bar crowds apathetic, and money scarce. After years of touring and working laborious jobs Jeffrey went back to school to get a degree in Teaching. He began teaching high school English.
Somewhere within this time frame the pursuit of fame shifted into the pursuit of the honest song. I met Jeffrey during this time. It was my freshman year of college and I wrote him a letter asking about his career as a high school English teacher and as a touring singer songwriter. He responded and it led him playing shows consecutively for the past three years at UP. Jeffrey took me under his wing and has helped me so much through words of wisdom, advice, and help with my own life and music career; he didn’t have to, and I don’t really think he knows that he did. Jeffrey stopped teaching last spring to pursue music full time. He toured around the U.S. for roughly six months, came home, and has been working on a new record. Jeffrey took time out of his writing and recording to meet me for an interview over coffee.
You write a lot about what it is like to be a man. Is this an active decision? Are you affected by the concept of what it’s like to be a man?
It’s funny you ask that, I was playing some songs with someone the other night and they asked me how messed up my childhood was…and it wasn’t at all. It was pretty brilliant my childhood was, and my folks are great. My dad is great. In my own personal experience finding an identity and having parents who shaped that well in me was good, it was really good. I think I am drawn to writing about the experience of being a man because our culture right now–it’s in such flux. For a long time, I feel that there was this stoic clear-cut identity that you could rely on. You get a job and you do it well and you provide for your family. And that is not the case any more and I feel the whole male identity is something people are having to redefine and it’s shaking things up in odd ways.
When I was teaching, my teaching shaped a lot of that because when you are a teacher you are very aware of violence in schools, nationwide and all the things going on with school shootings and everything. Statistically bad stuff has always happened but not on the level or in the way that it is happening right now, in terms of a lot of young men who are acting out in aggressive ways.
I am intrigued, there is a lot of that old era of the fifties and that generation. It worked well for one generation but beyond that the result was a lot of repressed male emotion maybe, and now there are kids of that generation who grew up and they don’t know who they are. It is a really scary thing and I don’t know why but that intrigues me, men trying to figure out how to be real.
Was your father a part of that lost generation?
If anything my dad somehow stepped away from that. From a young age even before he had kids my dad was pretty focused on trying to find out who he was and I think having that presence in my life as a father figure, and encountering a lot of people my age and a lot of fathers and older men that didn’t have that, it contrasted that a lot. I didn’t realize until I got older, maybe into college, how special my dad’s perspective was.
In your songs you talk about being a man in the working class. Your song poor man is about being a poor middle class pavement layer. There is always a level of poverty in your songs, is that purposeful?
I didn’t grow up in poverty… Maybe I did but my parents did a really great job of protecting me from knowing that. I have done a lot of blue collar work and when you rub shoulders with those folks you learn their stories and see their perspectives. There are legacies of being stuck in this lower middle class spot and you can’t move beyond it because there are so many forces out of your control. There is a sense of this, “Shit man I have been working thirty years busting my ass doing really good work and it has gotten me where?” Now there are these people whether they are in politics or on wall street, the one percent that are pulling the strings and it makes people feel really helpless and angry. That combination is volatile. John Steinbeck was writing about that a long long time ago, even he saw that stuff happening. I think the working class has an interesting story that doesn’t get enough of a platform, and it’s a classic folk songwriter trope you know, Dylan wrote about that and people knew it was true.
You have mentioned many times that you are a big John Prine fan and you wrote a funny song that reminds me of him. How do you make a funny song that is so well laid out like a Prine song?
I don’t know man. I wish I could do that more often because that song has been a learning experience for me. When I was in high school I used to be a huge Dave Matthews fan. I used to go to the Gorge in Washington and see him every year. I remember one year Dave Mathews said this thing, he babbles a lot on stage and he was talking about how everybody is the same, he said “we all came weeping out of somebody’s vagina” and it hit me so hard and I was drunk and at a Dave Matthews concert so at the time I thought it was prophetic. It stayed with me, that idea, especially from a history perspective we draw these huge lines between our present experience and the evil people who have done all the bad things in the world, like Hitler. It is easy to assume there is a huge separation between us and that, and there isn’t, there is just the thought that our beginnings were all very much the same. That song in particular is interesting because I didn’t intend for it to ever be taken seriously. In my own songwriting bubble I can get too fixated on the idea that all my songs need to be very serious and very dark and poignant. That song hits people and it is interesting to me because it wasn’t a throw away song but it wasn’t something I was expecting to get such a response from. It shows how my perspective as a songwriter can be limiting at times. I don’t know man; I don’t how I wrote it. I didn’t set out to write a funny song but it is directly influenced by John Prine. Prine does that so amazingly, he has so many songs that on the surface level are hilarious but when you sit with it for a while you realize it’s laced with a heavy message.
In your Jefferson Public Radio Session, you talk about your fear of collaboration. Have you always done things on your own?
I struggle with that still a lot. The way I think about it is that if you are going to be a performing musician you have to acknowledge that on some level you are an entertainer. You might consider yourself an artist or a poet and all that stuff which is legitimist but also you are an entertainer. There are a lot of people in bands and a lot of collaborators who hone that entertainment side of things really well and they understand that if they bring other people into a project, musically you can elevate things beyond what you can do on your own.
So far I am not drawn to that yet. I am not drawn to the musicality aspect yet. I am still very obsessed with the songwriting aspect and that is very private and personal. Even so with Anna Tivel who I play a lot with and we tour all the time together, we don’t write songs together ever. We bounce songs off of each other. If I write a new one, I will play it for her and vice versa but we don’t ever sit down to write a song together because we both value that very private perspective. Her songs are drastically different than my songs and how she approaches songwriting is different. We were in Nashville in October and a lot of our friends there are heavy into the co-writing culture because that is such a Nashville thing. I think I have a pretty bad attitude towards it because they are doing a lot of good things there but still I have bias because my thought is that if you sit down with three other people to write a song then even if you get the hook just write and even if it is a great song or a worthless throw away song, if it is a deep song still when you meld three people’s perspectives you are going to have to find some sort of common denominator. It makes things less distinct for me and so I love the idea of a very singular voice in songwriting.
What is your songwriting process?
My songwriting process is brutal and always the same. Right now I am trying to write a bunch of new stuff and I am in the phase of thinking everything is bullshit and so I sit down with my guitar and try to write. I daily conclude that this is all bullshit and I cannot write, and so I read. When I get frustrated I read or I listen to other people’s stuff. Over time over the course of a couple of days or weeks when I put in that effort my own criticism starts to be broken down a little bit and I find myself free to write again without being so critical. I still write a lot of bullshit but you have to write a lot of bullshit to get to the good stuff. I have met some people that when they are writing songs and when they are in that space they do not listen to other people’s stuff, they don’t read, they don’t want to be influenced. To me that is mind blowing because I need that inspiration. It always starts with reading. A lot of times with literature, I will have been reading a book and it won’t directly influence me. I don’t sit down and read Cormack McCarthy and find inspiration to write a song. I will be reading and then a couple weeks later I will write a song and I won’t realize until months later that a song was heavily influenced by what I was reading. I just have to put myself in that space and check out of all immediacy which is really hard right now because we all have computers in our pockets. I have to physically separate myself from those things if I am going to get anything done. The other day I was looking on Ebay at flip phones. Every once in awhile I switch back to this old romantic notion that I should just get an old Nokia flip phone like I used to have so that all I can do is make calls and some texts. I don’t do it because I know it would be such a pain to actually operate like that in the world today. I remember reading this story about benches. There are a few in Scandinavia and some in japan where cities have built benches that have no Wifi or cell signals. People have to seek out a place where they cannot access their devices because we don’t have the control to do it on our own.
In interviews you have talked about your goal for music changing and how you are now putting all your effort towards the betterment of the song. How have your goals changed and what do you mean?
Before I was teaching I had this notion of being a songwriter and I think everyone starts at this place of having these idols. Mine were John Prine and Neil Young and Bob Dylan and Guy Clark. It’s a very attractive notion to be made permanent in the timeline of our culture by the thing you create. When you die you just exist in your music and in your culture and that is a beautiful thought and I think that is what draws people to all sorts of ideas of fame. I then started teaching and was confronted with this really humbling thought that there are people doing good things with their lives, and there are people that are doing selfish things with their lives. That is not dependent upon art at all or anything it is dependent upon the way you live your life and the way you interact with people in general. I think that when I decided to stop teaching and go back to music I brought that with me a little bit. Now, do I want to be successful in music? Absolutely. But even if I exist in obscurity for the rest of my life I want to produce things that are full of integrity and I don’t want to ever lose that. I don’t make decisions now whether I am booking a tour or writing songs that will make me more successful. I do it now thinking about what will allow me to maintain this artistic space and integrity. I want to write real things. The deeper I get into the industry side of things I have found there are a lot of ways that if you have the money or the connections to cut corners and get yourself two hundred thousand YouTube views and all that stuff if you want and it’s a pretty hollow thing to do.