Jaye Jayle - Don't Let Your Love Life Get You Down - LP Gatefold

Under the moniker of Jaye Jayle, Louisville guitarist/vocalist Evan Patterson has spent over a decade exploring the more abstract realms of the American singer-songwriter process. The name—a reference to a bluebird locked in a cage as a metaphor for being tethered to the blues’ pentatonic guitar style and forlorn subject matter—underscores Patterson’s esoteric relationship to browbeaten themes and old musical traditions. The three previous Jaye Jayle albums—House Cricks and Other Excuses to Get Out (2016), No Trail and Other Unholy Paths (2018) and Prisyn (2020)—found Jaye Jayle continuously experimenting with form and traversing a myriad of sonic trails. On his latest album, Don’t Let Your Love Life Let You Down, Patterson continues to push at the boundaries of American blues and folk traditions while breaking the shackles of defeat and passing into a realm residing between Western stoicism and mystic wonder.

For Don’t Let Your Love Life Get You Down, Patterson fused the electronic sound-design approach of Prisyn with the full-band dynamic of his earlier work. The songs were rendered in an unconventional manner. Over the course of a year, Patterson tracked guitar lines with his longtime live sound engineer Nick Roeder in a studio built in a converted day-care center. Longtime Jaye Jayle member Todd Cook laid down bass next. Drums followed, with the duties split between Chris Maggio and ongoing collaborator Neal Argabright. Patterson and returning Jaye Jayle member Corey Smith then overdubbed synthesizers. Saxophone (courtesy of Patrick Shiroishi) and vocals (including a guest appearance by Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy) came last.