Have we ever said anything bad about Portland’s Jeffrey Martin? Let’s check. Looks like a no. His songs resonate and hit home hard, even with an easy delivery; his albums, then, are of course, essential purchases, and, dang it all, he’s good live too. What about this new song? Well, we’re happy (and pretty unsurprised) to report that ‘Edge Of Lost‘ delivers its slow and desperate message in a way that relentlessly builds a sense of increasing tension and despair. It’s not cheerful, that’s for certain, but life can be a heavy burden sometimes, and it’s not actually uncommon to feel that everything has gone wrong and there’s no way out – for all sorts of reasons.
So ‘Edge Of Lost‘ could be interpreted in any number of ways, but Jeffrey Martin has explained what was, for him, the original inspiration, saying: “This song was written from the imagined perspective of someone who has experienced homelessness. It was inspired by the interviews from the No Place to Grow Old documentary, which focused on a few 55+ people in Portland, Oregon, who were either currently homeless or right on the edge. Each person discussed the invisibility of being homeless. The heavy loneliness of living out in the open in a city, while at the same time becoming a ghost to the passersby. I tried to capture the chasm between the housed and unhoused, and how the psychological burden of that divide is a very difficult thing to hold as people try to navigate their way out of homelessness.”
