The story of J.M. Kearns, songwriter 

At age 30, J.M. Kearns abandoned his native Toronto and a future in academic philosophy, and thumbed his way to L.A. to be a songwriter.

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.

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.

In 2010 Kearns moved to Cape May, a 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, Songs of Surviving in the City, Vol. 1, releases on Nov. 15th, 2024, and it’s now in preview on Bandcamp. What’s different about the album is that its tracks are not love songs. They are about day jobs and unemployment and art and money and envy and yearning and depression and family and old age and loss — and sex. All the cruel, lovely things. The song titles tell the story: Living on the edge, The end of the world, Running out of line, More money than you, Bureaucrat in the snow.

On Bandcamp you can listen to the songs and enjoy what used to be called liner notes, including the story behind each song, musician credits, full lyrics, and photos. And you can purchase downloads if you wish. You can also preview some of the songs and a video, right here on our Music page.

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?