Stone Jack Jones

About Voodoo Home

Somewhere between the dignified wilderness and soul-struck portraiture of a Rosa Bonheur painting, and the hallowed seconds between interior impulse and exterior voice—blending like the pale light of a Nordic summer night in a country of his own mind—Stone Jack Jones casts a vision with the force of wind sweeping across the marshes of a long-lost Southern highway on Voodoo Home EP.

With the resolve of an artist casting his net into the unknown, searching for figures adrift on the surface that separates the seen from the unfathomable, his voice emerges like an echo from a haunted bluegrass tune—carried down from the mountains on high and across the murky waters of the lowlands. ‘Voodoo Home‘ builds a house among the strange, with “love to find us, love to bind us.” “This is my testament,” the venerable Stone intones within the comforting walls of the indecipherable on ‘No One’. And as the EP draws to its centerpiece, his voice bellows across ‘As If,‘ “Oh brother, I am here.”

A testament to a life of restless experimentation, Voodoo Home EP is not the culmination of self-discovery, but rather the sober, vivid reflection upon the mystery itself—staring deep into the unknown and finding solace in its embrace.

About Stone Jack Jones

There’s only a handful of things people know about Stone Jack Jones. One of them is this: He’s always moving.

After his family discouraged him from becoming a 5th generation coal miner in West Virginia Jones basically became a vagabond: A travelling musician with no particular place to go, Jones spent time in Ft. Worth, Baltimore, New York City, and Atlanta before settling in Nashville sometime in the early 90s to take a job with a railroad and raise a family. He kept making music, too, and formed a tight bond with a core group of fellow Music City outsiders, including Lambchop mastermind Kurt Wagner, singer-songwriter Patty Griffin, and -- crucially -- producer-engineer Roger Moutenot (Lou Reed, Yo La Tengo, Sleater-Kinney, Bob Dylan).

At 76 years old, Jones is still moving, though it’s been a while since he’s graced listeners with his signature psychedelic country noir. Aside from a collaboration with Nashville firebrand Adia Victoria in 2021, Jone’s last full-length was 2019’s undulating meditation on memory, Black Snake. Where that record gleefully limns the territories between the past and the present, his new EP, Voodoo Home, looks somewhere gladly beyond.

Where Black Snake boasted a lush and ornate production, Voodoo Home is decidedly skeletal but no less psychedelic -- spectral folk that’s more Spacemen 3 than Spiritualized. “Voodoo Home” sets the tone with hypnotic banjo and lyrics that recall the tail-end of a hero’s journey before a joyous deluge of rhythm -- something in-between a Lee Hazlewood production and a New Orleans second line parade -- carries us to some golden shore. “As If” takes the same instrumentation to a dramatic and hypnotic precipice -- a song that serves both as a plea and a bit of sinister reassurance. This transitions seamlessly to “No One” -- a slithering coda that dissipates into the ether guided by Kelly Diehl’s reassuring, doula-like vocals. “This is my trespass” sings Jones before the song ends with a sibilant gasp.

“It was not a conscious decision,” says Jones of the EP’s minimalist approach. “A lot of things have caused me to be still of late. Musing with music, I was hearing patterns that were haunted with bluegrass and Phillip Glass.

That said, Voodoo Home was fostered in a familiar way for Jones: Gathering his friends -- frequent collaborators, Mountenot, Diehl, and banjoist Kyle Hamlett -- on his back porch and letting the songs discover themselves. “Recording with Roger has always been such a great collaboration. He’s very much in the spirit of playing music. Playful. We’re not in isolated rooms, we’re all together. Kyle and Kelly and Roger all helped to paint it in the air, while hanging out on the back porch.”

As a result, the three songs that comprise Voodoo Home play like a suite: A gothic Appalachian song cycle that shivers with mortality and the beauty of release. The darkness is always tempered by the light.

“I have seen love bring light to darkness,” says Jones. “How could we live otherwise? Love will trespass in.