On this special joint episode of our two podcasts, In the Shadow of the Evening Trees and Two Minutes Fifty-Nine, Jennifer and I celebrate one of our favorite artists, Garland Jeffreys, who turned 80 on June 29.
To those who don’t know, Garland Jeffreys is a singer-songwriter from New York who wrote and performed some of the most influential, if not necessarily widely-known, music over a 50-year career from the late 1960s to 2018 or so. His first big hit “Wild in the Streets,” has been covered by multiple artists and featured in movies and on television over the years. He also traveled in the same circles as Bruce Springsteen, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, Willy DeVille, Lou Reed, and the New York Dolls back in the day.
In this week’s show, we talk about how we connected with Garland, first through the music and later through social media, and how, in a weird sort of way, we lived parallel lives without knowing it. Which is to say, we both started having kids around the same time, which led Garland to pause his musical career and us to drop out of pop culture for awhile, as parents do when their kids are young. And so we both reemerged, in a sense, around 2011, and that’s when our paths crossed in real life. Since then, we’ve gotten to know Garland and his wife, Claire, we saw Garland play live in Chicago on multiple occasions, and we ultimately traveled to New York for his farewell concert five years ago.
It’s impossible to summarize Garland’s career or what his music means to us, but he and Claire are working on a documentary of his life and music called Garland Jeffreys: The King of In Between (a fitting title, as we explain), and we’re hoping that it’s out soon. In the meantime, you can contribute to the pos-production costs here.
Anyway, please give this week’s show a listen and share your thoughts in the comments below. And remember, as Joe always said, “Without people, you’re nothing.”
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