J.M. Kearns’ album project 

During the Covid epidemic, aware of the fleeting years, long-time folk-rock songwriter J.M. Kearns conceived the crazy project of releasing online the best songs he had written over the last 50 years – none of them having got onto the radar screen of the public before. There were a lot of them. Some he already had good recordings of, but many needed to be recorded for the first time. A monumental task, it turned out. But he plunged in, and his first solo album, Before the Coffee Gets too Cold, was released online in May 2024, and the second, Songs of Surviving in the City, in November. The third album, only the love songs, is out in May 2025, and later there will be an album of country songs (Undiscovered Country) and an album of the first songs he ever wrote, in Toronto in the 1970’s. They are all on Bandcamp (more about it below).

KEARNS’ STORY:

In his mid-20’s in Toronto, grad student J.M. Kearns was bitten by the songwriting virus, planted by the insidious influence of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and other reprobates. He wrote his first song after getting his heart broken on a canoe trip, and after that the songs just kept coming. So he ditched a future in academic philosophy, and thumbed his way to Los Angeles, where songwriting was hot.

In L.A. there were a couple of near-breakthroughs — an audition at Electra-Asylum Records, a song meeting with Warren Beatty — but then things got real. Kearns had to eat. He worked as a house painter, then a telegram-singing donkey, and then he hunkered down as a bureaucrat at a huge downtown law firm, exchanging molecules with tall office buildings. He did a lot of writing and recording, but not a lot of performing. The secret reason: fear.

That changed when he moved to Nashville. After a thousand writers’ nights, he was given his first real gig, an 8:30 slot at a notorious club called the Gold Rush. Good things started to happen. Kearns found his mojo as a performer, and a band formed around him, dubbed the Lonely Mammals. In 2007 he issued a CD with them called Death or Life, and Elmore magazine gave it a rave review. Also that year, his novel The Deep End was published (you can find it here). And five of Kearns’ songs were recorded by independent artists. Unfortunately he had gone for broke with his Nashville dream and in the great crash of 2008, he hit that exact target.

In 2010, pursued by a giant snowstorm with his cat in an old Ford hemorrhaging oil, Kearns made the move to Cape May, a sunny beach town at the southern tip of New Jersey, where he performs in a trio called The Squares with his partner Debra Donahue and their friend M.Q. Murphy. And of course, he keeps writing songs. Oddly, his life’s circle became unbroken when a musician friend got him a job teaching philosophy at a nearby university. In May 2024 Kearns released his first solo album, Before the coffee gets too cold.

His new album, only the love songs, releases on May 16th, 2025, and will soon be in preview on Bandcamp. It’s a collection of his best songs about love, from all the years. It covers the gamut, from desirous to desolate, from the haunted humor of alienation to the blue flame of devotion. The songs were written as long ago as 1974, but most come from the 1990s. Five of the 13 songs are newly recorded in the last three years. 

A note about Bandcamp: it is one of the few sites where listeners can support artists they like, instead of watching them be ripped off by the big streaming sites. That’s right, you can buy a song for $1, or an album for $7, and most of that money goes to the artist. Who knew? You also can enjoy what used to be called liner notes, including the story behind each song, musician credits, full lyrics, and photos and videos.