Heirloom is a collection of 11 crisply mixed Americana tunes that seems determined to bridge the gap between the country-tinged folksiness of the Avett Brothers and the stripped-down honesty of Sun Kil Moon’s Mark Kozelek. There’s not much that’s flashy on the record — the album’s best track, “Bear Flag Revolt,” is lent an uneasy atmosphere by some pulsing distorted guitars, but that’s about it.
Instead, the clean, looping guitar riffs and understated vocal harmonies place the focus on singer-songwriter Jesse Payne’s lyricism. Payne’s writing places larger themes — misgivings about American passivity on opening track “Ulysses,” for example — in the context of the Appalachian landscape. On “Room Under Rugs,” he rebels against stagnation by “[running] toward the mountains.” For Payne, there’s an almost Romantic sense of meaningfulness, of catharsis, to be found in nature — and Heirloom seems to be an attempt to grasp that meaning.
The record — which has a sound inspired by Wilco, John Denver and José Gonzalez, among others — also features a sense of generational continuity, Payne says. It plays into a cycle that began with his debut album, 2010’s Nesting, and continued through 2011’s Buffalo EP.
“It’s kind of the final piece to the story,” he says. “I had this concept of wanting to have the cliché of circles of life. Everything comes in circles. Nesting is the building, Buffalo is the destruction, and then Heirloom is the album that finalizes the story of moving on and what you take with you when you move on. It’s a beginning and an ending. It’s the final chapter of what started with Nesting.”
That final chapter comes at the end of a long, difficult journey. Payne, who has been a member of Birmingham’s music community for years, started recording Heirloom three years ago. The process of completing the album, though, was stymied by a number of setbacks, both personal and financial.
As the recording process drew to a close, Payne says, “A lot of things in my personal life fell apart.” Though initial plans were to release the album in 2012, Payne and the rest of his band had to reconfigure. Payne says that the changes in his life convinced him that it was “extraordinarily important for me to go ahead and finish my degree” — so he enrolled at Birmingham-Southern College to pursue a degree in music. “It didn’t make any sense for me to go back to school if it was for anything besides music,” he says, and pauses for a moment. “The degree… It was just really important for me to finish it out.”
Though Payne doesn’t go into detail about the circumstances that led to this decision, he says it did highlight the importance of the album’s themes. “It just added to the story of, when you’re moving on, what do you take with you?” he says. “What are the most important things in your life and what do you want with you in the next phase?”
But there were other difficulties to contend with — namely, a budget for the record that had been depleted by the extended recording period. “It took three years of recording and working on the songs for Heirloom, and the budget just dwindled down,” Payne says.
His publicist introduced him to MusicRaiser, a crowdfunding website based in Milan, Italy, that Payne describes as “kind of like a Kickstarter campaign, [but] more hands-on. They wanted to be invested in all the projects they put out.”
Payne was slow to warm to the idea of a campaign. “It took us like a month to decide,” Payne says. “I’ve got mixed emotions about crowdfunding, but we had reached the end of our budget. I really was left with very few options. It was going to be the only way we could put out the record, to raise the last of the money we needed to release it.”
“It was a rollercoaster through the whole thing because, like Kickstarter, if you don’t raise your entire goal, then you don’t get anything,” Payne says. “All through the process this year — I think we started the campaign in March, and it lasted through May. Throughout the first half of the year, there was no guarantee that the record was going to be released.”
The fundraiser was able to gather $10,931 — exceeding Payne’s $10,000 goal — with only 115 donors, and an Aug. 14 nationwide release date for Heirloom has been set. “It’s just been a beautiful thing to live through,” Payne says.
Now that Heirloom is set to complete the cycle of releases begun in 2010, Payne says that the future looks bright. His music studies “[are] going to influence more of what is to come,” he says. “I guess it’s part of the evolution. With the life experiences that I’ve struggled to overcome throughout the last few years while making the record, and me going back to school for music, surrounded with a lot of talented people at Birmingham-Southern, I think the music is evolving beautifully, and where this is the final chapter of what began with Nesting, I do feel it’s more of a beginning.”
Jesse Payne’s studio album Heirloom is slated for a nationwide release on Friday, Aug. 14. He will perform at Saturn on Saturday, Aug. 15 as part of High Five Fest Four, which will also feature performances by Quadrajets, The Whitey Herzogs, Null, Pen Pals, Feather Canyon and Nerves Baddington. Doors for the festival open at 3 p.m.; the festival begins at 4 p.m. Tickets are $20. For more information on High Five Fest Four, visit saturnbirmingham.com. For more information on Jesse Payne and Heirloom, visit jessepayneonline.com.