LIMITED TO 35, NOT TO BE REPRESSED

In 2024, when Portland songwriter Andy Jones entered the studio to record his next LP as Berkley, he had 12 songs. As the production developed with songwriter Sam Weber (Madison Cunningham) taking on a guitar/piano role, first-call session drummer Micah Hummel (Anna Tivel), LA/Portland jack of all music Tejas Leier Heyden, and the producer’s producer Gus Berry (Love Dean, Still Woozy), a clear theme developed: the myth of the American west as a lens to explore the artist’s biraciality. But then there were the other two songs….

“Gram Theft Parsons” relays the final months of songwriting legend Gram Parsons and finds a warning in the facts of the matter. “Psychic Seer” meditates on an old friendship that’s run its course and the clarity that comes with age. Both fine songs (the songwriter will tell you this set of songs is his best work yet), but not aligned with the album that would be titled Vaquero.

“There is a thread between these two songs that made them feel even more outside the pack,” Jones explains. “They both take a closer look at the individual and their rationale. They both expose a danger of losing oneself to whatever they’re committed to.”

In “Gram Theft Parsons,” the eponymous songwriter forfeits his existence to his lifestyle. “Psychic Seer” shows how taking a friendship for granted can lead to its demise.

The story of “Gram Theft Parsons” leads the pair of songs in the fashion of a folk standard. “A no-frills song,” Jones calls it — acoustic guitars and voices in harmony telling a cautionary tale. Pulled from the pages of Johnny Rogan’s Byrds bible The Byrds: Timeless Flight Revisited: The Sequel (Jones is a self-professed Byrds head), the song traces Parsons’s descent into self-destruction and reveals its metaphor for musicians at any level:

Leave it all there on the table or the stage if you are lonely Be a legend or a fable, it don’t come easy if you ain’t hungry

The song emphasizes the loneliness of that life — and the starker loneliness of the end of the journey — with a chorus of coyotes.

“Psychic Seer” takes a similar folky approach to musically narrate Jones’s confessional, but pulls a sharp turn into rock territory in its coda where Weber and Jones cut heads to cheers from the band.

“These two have more of the live-in-studio energy to them than the album cuts too,” Jones concedes. “We tracked them all together, no click, full takes, but these two feature us more candidly. That was so satisfying and fun that these songs had to exist in physical form.”

Thus, the short-run 7” format preceding the singles and vinyl pressing of Vaquero (due this July).