Jack Symes, London

Jack Symes biography

With the exception of the occasional middle school talent show, Jack Symes preferred to keep his guitar playing to his Pasadena bedroom, and his songwriting even more locked up. Self-taught on the now extinct about.com, Symes recounts learning the basic open chord shapes needed to play songs like Simon and Garfunkel’s “59th Street Bridge Song”, The Shins’ “New Slang” and other songs that helped shape his folk-inspired sound. The diaristic title track “Tompkins Park” chronicles his first weeks in New York, his days spent at a park of the same name, writing lyrics on napkins and wandering aimlessly. On the dark slow burn “Wait”, Symes mines the wisdom of an Alan Watts book he’d been flipping through, recognizing that controlling love extinguishes it’s flame, singing “when she’s still, she’s running water no more”. The sequencing on Tompkins Park is masterful, pulling you in for hushed songs that feel like secrets, before erupting in triumphant revelations.

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