WILD ROOTS Magazine

You’re sitting in your living room, the sun is peaking through the front window, you can’t tell if it’s sun-up or sun-down, but you feel like having a glass of wine. You get up out of the wicker chair you’ve been sitting-in where you must have been a while because your bum feels sore with the unavoidable pattern of weaved-wicker on the surface of your porsche-bonnet that quickly turns to a mild-heat as your skin pop back into shape. You walk through the doorway to your kitchen. You look down at your meagre-collection of wine-bottles left over from the last time you went to the store and start looking at the label-art to determine today’s vin-du-jour. You come across a 2020 vintage with a robot walking past a western saloon that says Seasons at the top of the label from the Jon Danforth vineyard. You pop the cork, let it mingle with the air and say, “hello”. After a reasonable about of time you pour some into your glass. Swirling it around you first notice hints of “Hayes Karl” in the mix and aroma, and as you take a sip you realize this particular bottle is very complex. The complexity grows as you consume it further. The body of the wine seems somewhat warm and full on top, but it isn’t long until you notice similarities to the “Oakland garage scene of the late 2000s and early 2010s”. The flavour is familiar and pleasing, yet has its own boldness wherein it chooses to be its own wine while still rolling in several flavours without convoluting the mixture…

alllllllriiighhht that’s enough of that…

Haha we aren’t talking about wine at all. We’re talking about the great new EP from Jon Danforth titled Seasons. What you read up there is my stream of consciousness as I turned this record on. I was also thinking about wine. It’s 11:30 am on a Monday and I’m thinking about wine. This is going to be a long week…

Seasons. It’s good. I like the production. The production is full and there really aren’t any moments that take me out of the warm-mix provided by the beautiful performance and songwriting. It is a really easy 17 minute listen. As I allow myself to become immersed in the sound of the record I realize I find it reminiscent of records I liked as a younger man, but it is also devoid of the things that caused me to stop listening to those records. I hope that makes sense. I feel like Jon Danforth and I have listened to similar music over the years, and he has gone as far as to find a way to take the influence those records has on him and bring all the good-vibes together. Having an instant blast of nostalgia out of the gate with a brand-new album is a real high point for me. It says to me that there are many layers to Jon Danforth.

Jon Danforth is from Dallas, Texas, unless he was born in Arkansas like the first line says on track 5 Some Things Won’t Change. I’m just doing to say he’s in Dallas now. This “texarkana-flavour-human” has a wonderful voice. It’s a on the nasal-side, but it’s beautiful just the way it is and I want to hear more of it. You know the kind of voice you’d hear in a 1960s video of some garage-blues-band playing on TV in black & white? That’s what Jon’s voice sounds like, and I think that’s great.

The songwriting on this album is where it really shines for me. It’s meaningful. It says something. It says something, but not just about Jon. It speaks to me with what it’s saying, and it’s paced wonderfully from front to back. You’ve got your mumford-moments in Like a River, which has a nice ambient feel near the start and fits really nicely as the closer to the album as it builds and falls. You’ve got your vampire-weekend-disco in the third track Trouble. Honestly this is a great record worth picking up and listening to. When you’re past the comparisons which may entice you to do just that, you get a nice mix of modern americana that is perfectly fitting to an autumn morning and pairs perfectly with a cup of coffee

This album is great. As I said before: it’s nostalgic out of the gate, but it really becomes Jon Danforth immediately. Keep ‘em coming Mr. Danforth.

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