Invisible Pictures Jeremy Ivey

• 1Orphan Child03:57
• 2Trial By Fire02:54
• 3Keep Me High03:39
• 4Downhill (Upside Down Optimist)04:03
• 5Grey Machine03:00
• 6Phantom Limb04:40
• 7Empty Game04:10
• 8Invisible Pictures04:26
• 9Black Mood04:16
• 10Silence And Sorrow03:56
• Total Runtime39:01

Info for Invisible Pictures

“This is the kind of songwriting I’ve always been drawn to,” says Jeremy Ivey. “The perpetual motion, the intricate melodies, the sprawling arrangements. This album is the real me.”

Juxtaposing raw, unflinching personal reckonings with jaunty, buoyant melodies and rich, kaleidoscopic production, Invisible Pictures, Ivey’s third album for ANTI- Records, is indeed a revelation.

Though the songs are rooted in a 21st-century swirl of chaos and uncertainty, the record is, at its core, an undeniably feel-good collection, one that refuses to surrender to the existential ache it so artfully captures. Instead, Ivey embraces the sheer, unmitigated joy of creative freedom and sonic exploration here, drawing on everything from flamenco and classical music to vintage indie rock and British Invasion tunes to craft a passionate, transcendent album more reminiscent of John Lennon or Elliott Smith than anything coming out of Nashville these days. In fact, Ivey left Nashville altogether to complete work on the album, relocating to Los Angeles to finish things off with the help of legendary Smith collaborator Rob Schnapf.

“When you sing a melody in your head, you can either put three chords around it or nine,” says Ivey, who plays one of Smith’s hollow-body guitars on the record. “This time, I aimed for nine.”

Ivey’s never been one to shy away from a challenge. Born in San Antonio, he suffered a stroke and was diagnosed with cerebral palsy during infancy as a result of his birth mother’s battles with drug addiction. Doctors at the time said he would likely never learn to walk or talk, but Ivey proved them wrong, managing to become not only a gifted multi-instrumentalist, but a profoundly poetic writer, to boot. As a child, he was adopted into a strict Christian family, one that prohibited him from listening to popular music and kept him sheltered from much of the outside world through rigorous homeschooling. Understandably, questions about who he was (and who he was meant to be) dogged him throughout his adolescence, and as soon as he was old enough to set out on his own, Ivey hit the road in search of himself. For years he traveled the country, picking up work in kitchens and playing guitar to make ends meet. In Colorado, he lived in a tent; in Boston, he struggled with homelessness. Eventually, the road led to Nashville, where he began collaborating with (and eventually married) another searcher named Margo Price.

“When I met Margo, she was working as a waitress in a bar,” recalls Ivey. “We were both stuck with these dead-end jobs and shared the same dream of getting out and traveling the world making music.”

After years of sweating it out in the bars and honkytonks of Nashville, the pair finally experienced the breakout success they’d dreamed of in 2016, when Price’s critically acclaimed Midwest Farmer’s Daughter (largely co-written and recorded with Ivey) took the country world by storm. Ivey followed suit in 2019 with his own critically acclaimed solo debut, The Dream and The Dreamer, which NPR hailed as “modern, indie [and] super-cool” and Rolling Stone likened to “Mutations-era Beck.” Ivey’s 2020 follow-up, the pointed and timely Waiting Out The Storm, was similarly well-received, with The Nashville Scene declaring that it “deconstruct[s] the ills of the day—among them racism, xenophobia and the growing wealth gap—with a critic’s precision and a poet’s compassion.”

Jeremy Ivey

Jeremy Ivey
“I’m riding on a booger in the sneeze of space. That’s my bio,” jokes singer/songwriter Jeremy Ivey. It’s a tongue-in-cheek—albeit oddly fitting—description of the the Nashville-based performer, who has operated in the background for years, initially performing in bands like Secret Handshake and country-soul group Buffalo Clover with his wife, celebrated country-rock luminary Margo Price. But now, at 40, Ivey is ready to take a much-deserved step into the spotlight with a debut LP, The Dream and the Dreamer (out on September 13 via Anti- Records).

“I want to prove that you can be in your 40s and be at the peak of your creativity,” he says. “Not a has-been, but as an ‘is-being.’”

Recorded in a “little bitty house studio” in Nashville and produced by Price, the nine-song album hosts a collection of homespun, deeply introspective tracks. Ivey, who writes prolifically and ideally wants to release an album a year, cites everyone from the Beatles to Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, and Bob Dylan as influences.

Price has also been an enormous supporter since the day they met when Ivey was 25 and she was 20. “My 20s were a mixed bag between learning to play, but also being told not to,” he says, recalling an earlier relationship. “I didn't go to college. I grew up very sheltered in a very religious home, and I wasn't allowed to listen to a lot of music. I was pretty green and naïve.... And then when I met Margo, of course, she was a musician herself, and she was encouraging and telling me that I was good.” Unlike his country-soul aesthetic in Buffalo Clover, which disbanded in 2013, Ivey’s solo material is much more straightforward yet still travels through a wide spectrum of classic folk, gently frayed psychedelia, pop, and yes, even a bit of Southern rock and Americana. Piano-tinged opener “Diamonds Back To Coal” begins simply with open-chord strums but soon evolves into a multi-layered chorus of harmony and bouncy mid-tempo melody.

Beneath its uptempo exterior, though, lies a deep preoccupation with the news cycle and problematic nature of Manifest Destiny. “I wrote ‘Diamonds Back To Coal’ during a very frustrating week in America. It was the week that the Vegas shootings and the alt-right march happened,” Ivey says. “The slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ is an influence on the chorus. [Because] if anything, we're making the environment worse. When we came and infiltrated the Native Americans’ way of living, we started reversing the beauty that this land had. It has to do with modern man being a trespasser.”

Regression is admittedly a difficult notion for Ivey, who moved away from his conservative Georgia home after high school and bounced around, primarily doing prep work in kitchens. The harmonica-accented “Story of a Fish” chronicles Ivey’s personal diaspora, specifically relating to his upbringing. “I’m adopted, and I think that I always related with the story of salmon and how they’re born,” he reveals. “The idea of being born far from your home, you know? You were born here, but you gotta get elsewhere. That's the way I always felt. I always felt that I was born in the wrong place to the wrong people at the wrong time.”

Equally poetic is “Greyhound,” a twanging, Willie Nelson-esque cut that features Price on backing vocals and is an ode to, as Ivey calls it, “the lowest form of travel.” “It's about one specific trip I took from Massachusetts down to Georgia,” he elaborates. “We kind of treat [Greyhound bus passengers] like cattle. In a Greyhound, there's no hierarchy. Everyone's lower class. It’s about seeing America, kind of living at that level of near-homelessness.”

Though he’s far from anchorless these days, as a family man with one young son and a newborn, The Dream and the Dreamer is deeply indicative of Ivey’s roving mind. Its piano-led title track, which closes out the record, seeks to recapture the idea of the American Dream.

“I wrote The Dream and the Dreamer in my sleep,” comments Ivey. “[Margo and I] were in Mexico. We both passed out kind of early and I woke up in the night and I had this dream about these two characters. One of them was a glowing green ball and the other one was a figure. The dream is a green ball and a figure was the dreamer… And then it turned out that it was a story is about America, and that the dream was the American dream. The dreamer was the exodus from England to find a new place.”

Meanwhile, Ivey is invested in his own version of the American Dream—specifically, offering up a melting pot of genres, ideas, and stories. “The best thing I could say is that I'm trying to fill the holes that I can see in the scene,” he says. “Whether it be Americana or country or rock or whatever. There's a certain type of song that isn't being written.”

This album contains no booklet.