Waiting out the Storm

“I'm experiencing a wave of inspiration, because for so many years, and rightfully so, I was supporting Margo,” Jeremy Ivey tells Apple Music. “I think that having the opportunity to put out my own records, I've got a lot of pent-up inspiration. Because there are just certain freedoms that I can take when I'm singing the song that I can't take when I'm writing it for someone else to sing.” Bandmate, songwriting partner, and spouse to Margo Price, Ivey has a couple of decades of music-making experience, but the Price-produced Waiting Out the Storm is just the second slyly melodic, bohemian folk-rock album he’s released under his own name. “The first record I was really timid,” he recalls, “and the second record I've gained a lot more confidence, and I know that I sound like me, and how I sing is how I sing. And I'm proud of it now, where I wasn't before.” Another difference is that the Nashville-based, harmonica-playing singer-guitarist upended his writing process to put the lyrics first this time around. “In high school, I was that nerd who was reading poetry outside,” he says. “So I really wanted to prove myself, that the melody wasn't getting in the way of the lyrics. I didn't necessarily want it to be a doom and gloom thing, but we need to point out the fact that humanity is full of madness. And we need to figure out what the right and the wrong are.” Here Ivey walks through every song on Waiting Out the Storm.

Tomorrow People
“I didn't want to ruin whatever song I was going to write, because it seems like a pretty unknown sci-fi book. I was afraid if I read any of it, then immediately it would sway the idea that I had, which was just plain letter to people of the future. That one came pretty quick. Margo helped me with a couple of lines, but most of it came out all at once as soon as I got home from that bookstore.”

Paradise Alley
“I was in New York, and I had a couple of days off. I just went off on my own. I went to the Village, which is where I usually go, a lot of good people-watching. I sat down at a coffee shop with a notebook, and I was feeling inspired. I looked to one side of me and there was someone reading the book Paradise Lost, looked to other side, someone's reading a book called something Alley, I don't remember what it was. I just put those two words together and started writing. Honestly, it was a dreamlike thing, but when I was done, I realized that it all rhymed, but I didn't really know what it was about. What's interesting to me is that the first verse you know who's right and who's wrong, and by the last verse, not only do you not know who was on which side, but you also found yourself on the bad side. I like the song, because I can't pin it down.”

Movies
“I don't think I ever really meant it to be literally about movies, but that was kind of a trite and funny thing to say on a chorus. I never know what I'm going to write when it comes to choruses. I got a verse, and here comes a change, and what am I saying? I'd said that ‘they don't make movies like they used to,’ and I thought, ‘That's really a cop-out. It's not a very good line.’ But it ended up having more weight to it the more I heard myself sing it. I had this dream where I was a soldier in wartime. I was injured. They celebrated my bravery, and then suddenly somebody yells, ‘Cut,’ and the whole thing's a scene.”

Hands Down in Your Pockets
“When we were first playing that song, we were doing it slower. I actually had a melody for it, completely different. It got so fast where I couldn't really sing it anymore. Now I'm just talking it. It took a weird road to get there, but I like where it really ended up. Those words I remember writing in the back of the bus on the road with Margo in 2018. There's some humor in it, because one of the images, this skeleton man with his flesh pen signing his golden name, that's a public urinator. I put a couple of things to lighten the mood.”

White Shadow
“I was just trying to rip off Dire Straits. That song's about white supremacy. It's hard to not feel something about that, no matter what color you are. The words came fast. I wrote the melody right after I got done writing the lyrics. We have a walk-in closet, and I was actually in the closet playing it when Margo heard me, and she yelled that she liked it from the other room. So that was the stamp of approval that I needed to record it.”

Things Could Get Much Worse
“When I wrote it, I probably thought it could use some blues. I have a lot of absurdity in the stuff I write. I have a lot of, I guess you would consider it, prose. A lot of it's kind of zany and crazy, and I don't usually release that. Margo doesn't sing that kind of stuff. I didn't really have it on my last record. But I thought it was important to include that side of me.”

Someone Else’s Problem
“I remember feeling cornered in life. And not just from my perspective, because I'm a white male. I have nothing to complain about. Just society felt like it was cornered itself, where the rich were rich and the poor were poor. There's never going to be any connection between the two. I wrote the first couple of verses and I let Margo see it. I just handed her the notebook. And she usually would read something and be like, ‘Hey, I like that,’ or whatever, hand it back. But she didn't give it back. That's when I knew that it was good. We just go back and forth. You can kind of hear the first two are me, second two are her, third two are me. When it got done, we kind of argued about who's going to cut it. But it ended up that it just didn't fit on her record, so I did it.”

Loser Town
“That all comes from the beatniks for me, Ginsberg. That definitely informs a lot of the stream of thought where everything's kind of connected, quickly coming out. I think I wrote about eight verses to that song, and of course, in the studio, I felt like, ‘This isn't a pop song.’ So I cut out a couple of verses, but it still had a lot of words.”

What’s the Matter Esther
“I think it's probably pretty obvious that it's about Margo, to some degree. There was this time where we had kind of come to a crossroads and she was having a rough time with decisions she had to make. I wrote it in a weird kind of contradictory way where the character was unsure and very sure at the same time, you know, confused.”

How It Has to Be
“I just wanted to write something where it's all kind of happening at once and then, as absurd as it sounded, at the end of every verse I wanted there to be something that was actually you could hold on to what was a solid line. I had to have, like, what's the meaning of life in every verse. The first one is how people are in chains, the other half had the key. Second one, when a babe is born it becomes someone's enemy. I just went on like that. So no matter how crazy the verses were, when it came to the end of the verse, it made sense.”