JM Stevens is best known for his band Moonlight Towers, which, over a period of fifteen years cut four albums and played relentlessly on the Americana circuit. As time passed and life intervened the touring reduced, the band found they had life commitments to fulfil and Moonlight Towers went on hiatus. This was not the end of the musical road for JM Stevens though, as his upcoming solo album ‘Invisible Lines‘ proves.It’s an album that resonates in many ways with Stevens’ life, a lot of which he hadn’t really expected when he started but it turns out that he had a lot of issues to work through – his strict religious upbringing, his near-death experience as a teenager when the vehicle he was in was hit by a train, his divorce and the divorce of his parents. A lot of material for songs there as JM Stevens explains “That stuff goes somewhere in you. Now I hear [the album] and I think it’s got a different energy to it. It feels connected. Almost the entire album was recorded live—even the vocals. The lyrics feel connected to the band in a different way than if you overdub them. It just sounds more real to me. I’m proud of that. It fluctuates. It moves and grooves.”
Today’s song gives a taste of that energy – as Stevens acknowledges that running away solves nothing, staying at least offers a chance for redemption. It’s a neat piece of country-rock which has a nod to his own life story as the realisation of what he should do is a concept that hits him like a freight train. If you have that story – and survive it – then you are honour bound to use it.
Photo: Sean Lane
