Some years ago, I heard a track by Damien Jurado called “Paperwings,” off his 2002 Sub-Pop album I Break Chairs (which I included below). I was stunned with how closely it resembled Uncle Tupelo, but when I went to check him out further, I was apparently disappointed solely by the fact that he wasn’t just a moniker to the secret reunion of Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy that I’ve been longing for since Jay Farrar quit being awesome (circa 1993). What I found instead was the slower paced songs of the album On My Way To Absence. Thoroughly disappointed by my own unreal expectations, I closed the book on Damien Jurado until just a little while ago.

I barely recognized the name when I saw the press release about his new album, Caught In The Trees, but the single “Gillian Was A Horse,” which you can download below, is stunning. With a touch of alt.country in his voice and female vocals supporting, Jurado crafts a song that’s a departure from his previous work, at least in feeling. “I’m a lie detector, he’s no bullshit talker…” sings Jurado in the chorus, moving along with a jangling piano and simple guitar parts. The song has the immediately recognizable, but hard to describe, feeling of singularity, as though it were pulled in its complete form out of the ether, inseparable from it’s simple parts which fit together in a sublime perfection.

If the rest of the album is like “Gillian Was A Horse” then I think we’re all in for a real treat come September 9th when Caught In The Trees is released by the good people at Secretly Canadian. Until then, check out “Gillian Was A Horse” after the jump, along with the song that started it all for me, “Paperwings.”

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