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Damien Jurado

Since the late '90s, singer/songwriter Damien Jurado has built up one of the strongest catalogs on the indie scene, earning high critical praise for a poignant folk songcraft that has transcended detours into pop, roots rock, full-fledged electric indie rock, psychedelia, and even found-sound experiments. Nick Drake had a definite impact on much of his work, but Jurado modeled his career on more idiosyncratic, unpredictable figures like Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, and Randy Newman songwriters who followed their own muse wherever it took them, whether fans and critics enjoyed it or not. His independence was born at least in part from the influence of punk, and one of the results was a concern for emotional authenticity that led him to delve into other people's lives more than his own. Many of Jurado's songs spin concise, literate tales of quiet, everyday despair, which have often earned him comparisons to short-story writer Raymond Carver. Following a handful of self-released cassettes, Jurado made his official full-length debut in 1997 with Waters Ave S. His second album, 1999's Rehearsals for Departure, proved to be his critical breakthrough. After over a dozen albums combined for the Sub Pop and Secretly Canadian labels, he found his way onto the Billboard 200 for the first time with the Richard Swift-produced Maraqopa trilogy in the mid-2010s. He followed that with a quick succession of albums including his first entirely self-produced effort, 2018's The Horizon Just Laughed, and 2021's The Monster Who Hated Pennsylvania, with which he launched his own Maraqopa Records label. The next year's Reggae Film Star found inspiration in the unglamorous life, real and imagined, of those on the fringes of showbiz, as touched upon on The Horizon Just Laughed. His nostalgia for '70s and '80s cultural Americana resurfaced on albums such as 2023's Sometimes You Hurt the Ones You Hate.