About Briston Maroney

Sampun ing awal, Briston Maroney ora mau nelepon album ketiga sing eksplosif lan engrossing. JIMMY. He wanted to call it Jellyfish, the name taken from a poem he wrote when he was nine: “Jellyfish/The whole ocean/But nowhere to go.” That was a year before Maroney wrote his first song and many years before he had the language to describe what he was feeling, depression. That poem was a pivotal moment for Maroney, since he suddenly understood that he could use art and self-expression—at that point, poetry; for the last two decades, mostly music—to help make sense of the turmoil in his mind, heart, and life. But Maroney eventually realized that the idea of the jellyfish was too hopeless for what’s actually happening on JIMMY, a song cycle about scraping the bottom of mental, social, and emotional barrels and holding on long enough to do what can sometimes seem like life’s true masterpiece: simply being yourself.

Maroney’s folks split up before he was a teenager. Like so many kids, he spent the rest of youth shuttling between two places. With his father in the small and quiet city of Knoxville, Tenn., he was relatively privileged but pressured, a Catholic school student on whom great expectations were placed. With his mother in north Florida, a landscape more raw and real than almost any other in the continental United States, he was surrounded by country folks who only seemed to give a damn about one another. They’d show up for oyster roasts and get red-wine drunk on Saturday, then be spiffy for church by Sunday morning.

Maroney didn’t fit in with either demo, really. He was the country guy who loved fishing at dams with his dad in Knoxville, the city slicker Catholic schoolkid back among the mangroves and slash pines. But he was drawn to the devil-may-care spirit of the Floridians, the folks who only wanted to look after each other and themselves. There was one man in particular—perpetually clad in denim shorts and a white Margaritaville T, occasionally a durag—that caught Maroney’s attention. Sure, maybe he was a redneck, but “he was a good friend who people loved,” Maroney remembers. He became the inspiration for JIMMY, for these songs about trying to be nothing more than yourself.

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