“I can see what Jed Davis was trying to say to me.”
So ad-libs Daniel Johnston during his cover of Jed Davis’s “Enlightenment.”
What Johnston sees, what Jed shows through his immense catalog of songs, is: Life is like passion fruit, its bitterness inseparable from sweetness. To understand joy and love you must also have loneliness; but thanks to loneliness, you will truly appreciate joy and love.
Jed began recording demos of his painstakingly crafted alt-pop tunes and giving them away at solo coffeehouse performances in the mid-1990s. The demo cassettes traveled far and wide, finding their way into the hands of artists like Johnston, King Missile, Anal C*nt, Agnostic Front and Brian Dewan, all of whom recorded covers of Jed's tunes.
After moving to New York City, Jed put out two albums of techno-punk as programmer for the Electroclash-pioneering band Collider. He also began to collaborate with the legends of the punk rock scene, particularly the Ramones. Joey Ramone invited Jed to open for him at his final CBGB performance; when Jed wrote "The Bowery Electric" in posthumous tribute to Joey, the surviving Ramones reunited to record it as a single and perform it live.
After releasing two albums as a member of The Hanslick Rebellion (whose video for the song "You Are Boring The Shit Out Of Me" was a YouTube smash - and the Jed-penned guitar hook from that tune was called "The years most undeniable riff" by Spin magazine), Jed has returned to solo duty.
His recent Eschatone release I Am Jed Davis! is a primer of sorts. Featuring 16 genre-smashing tracks culled from Jed's wild musical adventures over the past decade, the album includes the aforementioned "Bowery Electric" - the only recording of the surviving Ramones playing together - as well as incredible instrumental performances by Dweezil Zappa, Tony Levin, Brian Dewan and Anton Fig. From late-night recording in the back booth of a Denny's restaurant, to cutting tracks live to tape with Steve Albini at Electrical Audio, it's a crash course in making records the Jed Davis way!
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