Taste Test: Common Jack trails ‘Canyons in the Dark’
Brooklyn’s alt-folk singer supplies tender instructions on overcoming mental pain with new single.
Welcome to Taste Test, a song/video review series of SubmitHub-only gemstones
Rock bottom can look like many different things to many different people. And that doesn’t minimize one kind of pain from another. It just is. For alt-folk locksmith Common Jack (real name John Gardner, a favorite ’round these parts), his sprang from unburied pain that pulsating and rattled his skull and tore the membrane. Mental health is a plague that feeds on our ever-widening fault-lines and insecurities, and in giving into the soul-hungry beast’s cravings, we then transform into the very thing we fear. Of course, it’s never that easy. “There’s so much you’re holding in / And your heart is feeling fragile,” sings Gardner, who only approaches such a topic with tenderness. “When the night is closing in / Still I stand by what I said / There’s no other place to start / Than with your weary feet beneath you.” He guides the listener through the steps he himself once took, and we, too, are then able to unpack our worriers ⏤ if only for a moment.
“Canyons in the Dark” primes Gardner’s new EP of the same name, out later this year.
Listen below:
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