Dark sider

This tall, bespectacled, Ypsilanti-based singer-songwriter has been warming up hearts around here for a half-dozen years. His songs, often stunning, folkish narratives and image-rich ballads, feature a voice that can croon with heartbreaking sincerity or pull you in like some pucker-lipped carnival barker, stroked by acoustic finger-picking, below-the-belt cellos and purring violins. 

After releasing what was one of the best albums of '09, here or anywhere, Matt Jones spent most of 2010 not eating, not sleeping, basically working on drinking, and doing well. He became a writer with no ideas, was headed straight from writer's block to burnout. ("I lost my mind for a year," he says.) 

But Jones isn't milking some Lost Weekend cliché: As booze often will lead you from character, Jones stopped focusing on his own work and wound up going electric! So this is about a songwriter falling, getting all loud, stopping, sobering up and then reappearing. 

Big deal, songwriters get drunk and give up all the time, right? But this Jones guy is one of those you wind up rooting for, because he's that good and personable, and you know the world is a lesser place without him writing and singing his ass off in it. 

Then, of course, there's the disarming delight of his childlike chuckle; his self-deprecation is authentic, earned. And Jones is funny as hell. 

And that marvelous album, his debut, The Black Path, is a devastating collection of beautiful baroque-rich folk rags, woozy laments and warm acoustic waltzes, fueled (if not haunted by) a kind of tangible nostalgia, disquieting memories and eerie, airy ambience. 

Even Jones' ancestry ties directly to Civil War battlefields and circus freakshows (on his mother's side: her grandfather and his father were circus performers, and the singer's great aunt was a sideshow attraction in the classic horror-show film Freaks, the armless one who played guitar with her feet. Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy was an occasional dinner guest in the family home). Though Jones, like any songwriter worth his salt, has had to work through heady personal problems, his tunes have never slipped into the goofy supernatural or the too sentimental. Jones is not one of those "Midwest beardo-sensitive types"; in fact, if the cello and upright bass creak out stark lullaby basics, it always is given a warm, just-barely jovial gloss by Jones' melodies, words and breathy delivery. 

> Email Jeff Milo