Sometimes when you’re trying to figure out where you’re going, you have to take a beat and figure out where you are, where you’ve been, and where you come from. Newcomer Jeremy Current’s alt-country meditations attempt to do just that. Current grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina. He graduated in the class of ‘04 at United Faith Christian Academy. The next three years he spent on a zig-zag path which took him places a five-year plan probably would not have. He spent a month working with his estranged father in Atlanta. Soon he sold his car and signed up for a year-long outreach program in London. He spent several months there collaborating with friends overseas in the short-lived electro-pop project Redwood. Current’s soulful voice was one of the many eclectic elements that went into the creation of these translucent, richly-layered tracks. Redwood culminated when members Ryan Jahn and Tim Morrison met up with Current in London and the three shipped off for their first and only tour, through—of all places—Latvia. After London, Jeremy returned to Charlotte. On New Year’s Day 2006, he headed for Savannah, Georgia, where he moved in to a rickety flat with Jahn. Further collaboration between the two produced little; Jahn was swamped with work, graduating from SCAD and touring with his band Arcasia Red. For the next year Current waited tables, met musicians by the vanload, dabbled in film and modeling, and struggled to write his own songs. “I went down there to write music and didn’t write anything,” he confesses. “I wrote one song and it sucked.” In November 2006, he moved back to Charlotte to more of the same. Continuing his habit of sticking close with high-school friends who were still pursuing music, he moved into another rickety two-bedroom house with a big, burly tower of exuberance named RH Dyar. By the age of 20, Dyar was a tour manager, merch-maker, and show coordinator, as well as a promising singer-songwriter/musician himself. His tireless enthusiasm and positive energy helped Current enter into the most fruitful stage of sustained creativity he’d ever experienced. While Current was not a member of Dyar’s nascent band, Robert Hardy and The Hardy Boys, he caught from them the contagious fascination with a familiar genre (tangled up in the fascination with a familiar place)—a genre that could ironically but lovingly express the tension between an old world and a new one, between nostalgia and restlessness: country. Over the next several months, Current began the delicate construction of his own acoustic, lyric-driven country songs. While he did not have a band, he eagerly shared home recordings and played his songs for his friends, always open (the humble guy that he is) to constructive criticism. By May 2007, he and Dyar decided to make an ambitious lunge at New York City. Before they moved, Robert Hardy and the Hardy Boys played a farewell show at Tremont Music Hall, where Current opened with the first public performance of his new material. A month later, their first attempt at living NYC had quickly run out of capital. They returned to Charlotte, shrugged and kept at it. Current swore off modeling forever and made the laudable move to enroll as a college freshman at the age of twenty-one. He currently (sorry, I had to) juggles his time “learning how to learn,” as he puts it, and working on his music. -Patrick O'Boyle <a href="https://www.last.fm/music/Jeremy+Current">Read more on Last.fm</a>. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.