Jeremy Serwer Concert

He has been a force in the songwriter movement for more than a decade. In interviews, he speaks to the precarious state of authentic songwriting and independent music today.

In the tradition of performers like Steve Earle, Bruce Springsteen, Jeff Buckley, and Mark Lanegan, Serwer looks “underneath the beauty and glamour of the United States,” he says. He’s a “serious-minded songwriter,” writes Jeff Rosenberg of the Portland, Ore., Willamette Weekly, and his songs are at once graceful, hopeful, scathing, and heartbreaking. “Like Billy Bragg, he’s a political songwriter dealing with a post-ideological world,” says Madeline Ostrander, independent journalist and contributing editor of YES! Magazine.

More than twenty years ago, Serwer began performing music after leaving his hometown in rural Wisconsin to serve as an army medic in Korea. For seven years, he worked with street kids in social services in Oregon, Arizona, and Minnesota. Today, his image-dense lyrics and potent mix of rock, blues, jazz, and Americana draw deeply on such experiences. His throaty croon and skillful steel-string guitar performance are irresistibly captivatingundefined“one of those once-in-a-lifetime voices that make grown men cry,” says Grammy-nominated folksinger Holly Figueroa O’Reilly.

“Jeremy’s language is visual and organic, and his grooves become soundtracks to life,” says one of Seattle’s most influential songsters, Jim Page.

In 2011, he opened Etruria Studio in Seattle, where he records independent artists from around the region. There he produced his fourth solo album, In the Hour of Our Lords, which forms a trenchant, poetic conversation about American lifeundefinedeverything from poverty and homelessness to the death of wolves and coyotes. “It was the only way I could say what I felt that would not land me in jail,” says Serwer. “My heart was breaking with the grief of our reality ecologically and socially.”

Serwer has also hosted or been part of performance circles around the country with musicians like Jim Page, Holly Figueroa O’Reilly, Anne Weiss, and Jeff Campbell, and appeared in the 2010 Seattle revival of Fast Folk, the music collective launched in Greenwich Village in the 1980s. His previous CD, Roads, was chosen as CDBaby’s editor’s pick for 2010.

http://www.reverbnation.com/jeremyserwer