In late 2023 Graham released his long awaited, fourteenth studio album Only Dead For A Little While. He will celebrate his album release returning to Houston for the first time since 2020 for a performance at The Continental Club on Thursday, March 21.
Graham takes inspiration for the title from a 2018 brush with death, one of three he has experienced in his 65 years, proving that he is not only mentally strong but somehow physically stubborn as well.
In 2018 after playing an extraordinarily hot show in Chicago’s famed FitzGerald’s club, Graham went to rest for a spell in his van with the AC running when the next thing he knew he was being pulled out of the car by a police officer.
Graham was officially dead for five to seven minutes, just missing the lasting effects of brain damage. Following the incident he began working on this album and continued playing his weekly residency at Austin’s Continental Club, which has been running for a whopping 27 years now.
As he got down to really working on the album, COVID shut down the world and like everyone else, he had to wait. “I started the record maybe a month before the lockdown and so I had already had my death experience but then we had to put it on hold for about a year,” says Graham.
As things got “back to normal” and Graham returned to working on the album, in 2022 he suffered a stroke. “It just felt like goddamn, it’s almost like he doesn’t want me to make this record and they don't know who they’re dealing with,” he says of the higher forces.
“I’m going to make this record and it’s weird. I think this is one case where I think I can not worry about humility so much and go, yeah you know what? It’s a fucking great record,” says Graham sternly.“It just felt like goddamn, it’s almost like he doesn’t want me to make this record and they don't know who they’re dealing with.”
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And a great record it is, not that his others aren’t as Graham is no stranger to writing perfect songs that resonate with anyone with a pulse but on Only Dead For A Little While, he and his longtime band The Fighting Cocks have bottled in the studio the energy of a caged tiger in heat that he shows on stage.
“This stuff is hard to talk about without getting all sentimental and soft headed and stuff but the truth is that after everything that happened, I gotta finish the record. I think this is maybe the most urgent record I've ever made where you can feel that urgency,” says Graham crediting that sentiment in part to being aware that it may be the last record he ever makes.
His first dance with the grim reaper was back in 2008 when he was severely injured following a car accident while on tour. The incident influenced his fantastic 2010 album, It's Not As Bad As It Looks and though it took a while, he recovered.
“That's not like a bad omen or something but what if that’s the last record I make and I'd like to think that if that is the case, man I'm so proud of that. I got to talk on this record about some things that I've been wanting to sing about for a while but I was shying away from it. It’s hard to talk about and particularly, it's hard to talk about your own record but I’m proud of this one. I’m super proud of it.”
The album kicks off with the rock and roll “Where It All Went Wrong” showing off Graham and his band, Michael Hardwick, Andrew DePlantis and Joey Shuffield’s ability to melt together and capture their lighting in a bottle.
The growl in Graham’s voice is more guttural and real than ever as he describes the rapid descent of humanity from cave dwellers to clock punchers. As the track ends with a sonic riot from the band, you can hear Graham confidently celebrating the mood with a gravely “Yes, yes, yes” and a request to keep the train rolling.
The album is different in many ways for Graham but another is his inclusion of his family in the song selection as he covered his son William Harries Graham’s “Astronaut” and his wife Gretchen’s lyrics admiring war correspondent Marie Colvin in “Brave As Her.”
Graham also included the touching and reflective “Brought Me Here To You” a song about all of the tiny steps, good and bad, that lead us to our destination and in this case, to be with the person we are supposed to be with despite the long journey there.
Just like Graham and what has made him a long time favorite in Austin and beyond, every track drips with sincerity and grit, traits that he inhabits himself on and off stage. Graham has long held the ability to go from a hushed tone to a howl. A range reflected in his career from his punk rock work in The True Believers and The Skunks to being a poet in his solo work and in his possible alter ego of the sweetly sullen bear he illustrates in books, prints and for the cover of the album.
Hearing Graham do his take of the classic Rev. Gary Davis’ “Death Ain’t Got No Mercy” only cements his force as a performer and messenger from beyond this realm.
“The thing is you live long enough and you're going to start losing friends. It’s not a question of mercy, it's a question of what death does. It’s a dark spirited song but it’s not dark really, it’s embracing the fact that it’s not just in this land or this town, it’s in your house. It’s an equalizer, it flattens the curve out for everybody.”
Graham may continue to skirt his brushes with death in real life, but in Only Dead For A Little While he continuously addresses it head on and with all the bravery of a well traveled soldier.
Despite surviving, and being on the continuous up and up health wise, with Graham reporting that he is almost back to his 6 feet height, performing standing up and not requiring a cane all the time, his body like life continues to have ups and downs making planning a long tour very difficult.
“I got off so lucky with my health problems but it's still a fact. There’s certain things I'm struggling with physically. Because of the nerve damage, it's hard to sit in one place for very long and so being in a tour bus or being in a van, it's just hard but man, I gotta go to Houston. I have not seen my people in Houston in years.”
Jon Dee Graham will celebrate the release of Only Dead For A Little While on Thursday, March 21 at The Continental Club, 3700 Main, 8 p.m, $13-23.
