Today it’s good news and bad news – the first being that Eilen Jewell has a new single out, and the second being that it is accompanied by the announcement that after twenty years of touring Eilen Jewell will be taking an indefinite hiatus from the road as she has said: “After 2026, touring and I will part ways for a year, maybe two, maybe fifty…it’s hard to say at this point. I do hope to keep performing in some capacity. Maybe come see me on a weeknight in some Boise dive, playing for potatoes? Or strumming the guitar for a handful of fellow meditators as we contemplate the Dharma and the temporary nature of all things. I need some time for a new exploration, to try to be the kind of mother I want to be, and to stop moving long enough “to let my soul catch up with me,” as my grandma Jeanne used to say. Who knows what will come of that? Maybe on some jingle-jangle morning I’ll come following the next great dream, rested and ready to go anywhere. But until then, suffice it to say…thank you. Thank you, thank you to everyone who carried me forward all this way and in all your different ways“.
Eilen Jewell has explained that “I first heard “Deportee” when I was a teenager. I can’t recall which version it was, but I remember I was babysitting a little girl who was about six years old. She put it in the cd player, cranked it up, and started singing along loudly in a sweet and mournful tone. I could tell it really resonated with her so I listened closely and realized it resonated with me too–the grief in the sudden separation of friends, the ripping away of a shared humanity–it’s haunted me ever since. I’ve heard just about every version of it there is, searching for one as anguished as the one in my memory of that night with the little girl howling along. My search never yielded one that quite fit so I altered the song a bit by putting it in a minor key and choosing only the verses that felt closest to the bone. It’s disheartening to think that Woody Guthrie wrote Deportee nearly 80 years ago and it still rings true. What can I do but join him in fighting fascism the only way I know how–with my conscience, with my guitar, with my voice.”
