The Original Folkstar - Jack Harlan

This is a piece for Jack Harlan's website (jackharlan.com). Jack and I used bum around nondescript Western Canadian cities in that ever-so-simpler time called the early 90s when we were going to change to world with acoustic guitars. Check him out.

Jack Harlan is a folk musician. There. I said it. Unapologetically. ‘Folk.’ But before you fill your heads with visions of impossibly long-haired songstresses swaying rhythmically to ‘Lemon Tree’ with eyes closed and heads turned heavenward breathing in the fumes of a $5 Bed Bath and Beyond candle or bleary-eyed baby-boomers husking out half-countrified versions of ‘Rocky Mountain High’ through greying goatees, put the cliché bag down for a minute and think about that word.  

Folk.

Folk = people.

Folk  music = music for people.  

Hang on, you might say. Isn’t all music made for people? Why make music at all if not for people to listen to and enjoy?  Well . . . I don’t know about you, but in my time I’ve heard music for money and music for manipulation. I’ve heard music to wave a flag to and music to bump uglies to. More than anything, I’ve heard everywhere music to simply drown out the sound of living.  

This is different. Jack Harlan’s music is the sound of living.  

It’s music for people. I’m not talking about ‘The People’ or any Grand Concept like that. Just people. People who will say, “I’m a person” before saying, “I’m a personal fitness guru,” or “I’m a post-punk indie columnist,” or “I’m a hot-bodied, macrobiotic yoga instructor.” Just people. Folks, even.    

But Jack lives in a world the rest of us folks have only glimpsed. You can hear it in his songs. It’s a world of freight train whistles and wandering strangers; of still-noble little guys in a fucked-up world and dangerous women with eyes like the smoke of the night’s last cigarette. It’s a world where candles burn in windows for lost loves and roads just wind around, leading nowhere but the next journey; where the voice in the wilderness is the rule, not the exception. Most of all, it’s a world of truth. Jack’s songs take this greying, dog-eared world you and I live in and hold it up to the light without the fringed window treatments or celebrity spokesmodels. And guess what, folks? It doesn’t look good. Makes you feel downright raw inside.  

Jack can help you with that.  

But if you’re looking to be coddled – if you want someone to pat your head while hand-feeding you mocha swirl cupcakes – you’d better stop now. Go. There’s a cute panda drawing here. Jack can comfort and celebrate that rawness, giving you an insider’s guide to the darker nights of the soul (in songs like ‘Be Not Your Failures’); he could expose the perfect and universal essence of that taken-for-granted lover beside you on the couch (‘She’); he might launch you into a celestial-sized personal transformation with the power of several supernovae (“Burning Star”), but he won’t lie to you.  

So click. Download. Listen. After the confected pop and dried-up, mummified mall music we don’t even realize we’re consuming anymore, we need this. We deserve it.   

Jack Harlan doesn’t make music to clean the house to, make out to, walk the dog to, do Pilates to or flip quarters off your car roof to.  

He makes music to live your life to.