Don Jacobs is as a muralist and successful visual artist in Jackson, Mississippi. His music took second place so his other 'career' to date has consisted only of playing pub gigs in Europe while studying for his art degree.
Now he's decided to resurrect some of those old tunes - "It's been a fun and fulfilling experience helping these songs come back to life", he says. Perhaps it's not surprising that nostalgia is uppermost in this material, both in terms of content and style. They harks back to a 60s era of pop innocence.
It's hard to think that Jacobs has any specific target audience in mind, I suspect the buzz of getting a recording made at all is the main objective with this project.
The title track recalls a rime when listening to the radio under the bed sheets opened up a window to whole new world, a subject that also inspired Van Morrison's 'In The Days Before Rock'n'Roll'. Jacobs, like Van, tells of the thrill of hearing the blues, rock and Memphis soul for the first time; a time when "even Nashville had a message to deliver" but the comparison between the two artists ends there.
The harsh truth is that none of the tracks here has any real depth or substance and the quality of the recording does the artist no favours at all.
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The beat to most sounds like a Casio home music system has been set to 'vague calypso' and then added the vocals from a microphone in an adjoining room. You can't even say that it has a lo-fi charm and it made me wonder why, after all these years, Don Jacobs didn't go to the trouble of investing in a more professional sound.
The songs themselves are mostly forgettable tales of love and lust including one truly dreadful one about being under the spell of a hot woman called Lorelei with embarrassing lines like: "I want to wrap my heart around you, feel your perfume in the air".
Fair play to Don for keeping his own dream alive but the songs here only confirm that he made the right choice when he decided not to abandon his day job : http://www.donjacobs.net/home.html
12 tracks - Playing time - 46.29 mins
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