Some songwriters use music to tell you what they believe. Music by Jeremy takes a different approach: he would rather put a question on the table and let you sit with it. On Scenes from a Well Worn Path (Side Three), the third instalment of an ambitious 24-track, four-part double album, the singer-songwriter turns his attention away from personal reflection and toward the contradictions of the world around him. The result is thoughtful, literate songwriting that trusts listeners to draw their own conclusions.
Scheduled for release on 25 October 2026, Side Three continues a project that functions as a musical autobiography, assembled from significant scenes across Jeremy’s life. While the first two sides look inward, this instalment widens the lens. Its songs explore economics, love, everyday life and the strange gap between how the world promises to work and how it actually does. Rather than delivering political declarations or neat philosophical answers, Jeremy builds each song around an observation and allows its implications to unfold.
“Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” is a particularly intriguing example. Taking its title from John Maynard Keynes’s 1930 essay, the song revisits the economist’s vision of a future in which technological and economic progress would leave people with far more leisure. Jeremy contrasts that promise with a world in which abundance has arrived but its benefits have been captured. Opening with a line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the song frames this failure as something almost spellbinding: a distortion of reality that people have gradually accepted as inevitable. It is a substantial idea, approached through storytelling rather than a lecture.
Elsewhere, “I Don’t Know” brings the album’s intellectual curiosity into more intimate territory. Constructed as a mathematical proof that cannot quite establish the nature of love, it reaches for concepts including prime numbers and irrational constants before arriving at a truth that needs no calculation. The premise gives a familiar subject an unexpected perspective, demonstrating Jeremy’s ability to use abstract ideas in the service of recognisable emotion.
The album’s musical construction reflects the same balance between simplicity and depth. Every track begins with words and acoustic guitar, with the arrangements subsequently expanded through bass, drums and subtle MIDI elements. Working independently from his home studio in Banbury, England, Jeremy uses generative AI tools trained on his own voice to help develop arrangements he could not readily assemble with a conventional band. He then refines the results, playing the guitar and bass parts himself and shaping the final recordings around his songwriting.
The technology is part of the process, but it is not the point. What matters is the writing: carefully structured songs, generally running between three and three-and-a-half minutes, that reward attention without demanding it. Drawing on the storytelling traditions associated with John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Randy Newman and David Bowie, Jeremy brings a literary sensibility to music that remains grounded in ordinary human experience.
Scenes from a Well Worn Path (Side Three) offers no easy answers, and that restraint is one of its strengths. Curious, self-aware and unafraid of contradiction, Music by Jeremy makes space for uncertainty in a world that often rewards certainty above understanding. These are songs to revisit, not because they insist on having the final word, but because they leave you with something worth thinking about.
English