Liner Notes

Like the perfect, handcrafted mixtape made for a long road trip, Andrew Jones' Liner Notes is a soundtrack for exploring our lives-places we've been, people we've loved, people we've lost-and the music that accompanies it. With Jones' keen eye for detail and lyric, "we boomerang / the land of sunsets / and flyover country," we venture into Midwest barrooms and western wildernesses, we are pushed to let our "assembled voice lure like a stoned siren / singing on a summer night." Dylan, Parsons, Welch & Rawlings, an elegy to Jason Molina-like any good playlist, Jones weaves these singers and their songs into his poems masterfully, creating a larger sequence of moments and experiences worth reading and playing over and over again. Come along for this journey, "Share your burdens through song, / whispered lyrics or distorted guitars," dig through the crates of old LPs, listen to the music of this writing.

-Michael Garrigan, Author of Robbing the Pillars

Andrew Jones is devoted to the rhythm and tension of America as we hope it is, one that is within our power to make and our burden to carry. His poetry blows red dust, smoke, rain. I know his as a musical ear, bent towards lament and revelry. His pen bends this way too. Read these poems and be glad for them as reminders of what is, and what could be.

-M. C. Taylor of the band Hiss Golden Messenger

In Liner Notes, Jones reminds us that, while memory and music are inextricably linked, the soundtracks of our own lives are never as polished as those we've come to expect from a Hollywood production. Our narratives don't emerge in clean packages on the other side of a cutting room floor. These poems reveal a fundamental truth that we might not want to admit: our stories-their particular unfoldings-are often out of our hands. We have little control over the days that define us; the moments that become momentous; the people, interactions, or images that are burned in our brains; or the songs that resonate and reverberate throughout the years. They choose us, sometimes not revealing themselves until years later, when we are suddenly reminded by some artifact or briefly reunited through the radio.

-Samantha Lamph/Len, Creator/Co-Curator of Memoir Mixtapes