Durand Jones - Wait Til I Get Over

“Hometowns have a way of keeping a part of you,” says Durand Jones, regarding his forthcoming solo debut album. Wait Til I Get Over is a veneration project—an abstracted and contemporary oral tradition that passes story down from (and heaps homage upon) his hometown of Hillaryville, Louisiana.

Jones lays us several courses and flavors of sound that are all distinctly Southern and Black—rhythms heavy with raw, Delta grit; bright exhalations of church spirituals; even tender, cadent spoken word. But most importantly, each track is an arc quite literally grounded in the story, the feeling, and the sound of what it means to go home. Taken as a whole, Wait Til I Get Over joins albums like Sound & Color, A Seat at the Table, and WE ARE as a mesmerizing new addition to Southern Black music, affirming Jones as a uniquely gifted artist and vanguard of the form.

An unincorporated hamlet—cradled along the Mississippi and founded by eight former slaves through reparations—Hillaryville is a tangle of contradictions. We, the listeners, come to know this place through Durand’s view of its history and his own experience of it. What was a flourishing, insulated Black community is now crumbling country lanes. An adolescent Jones’s drive to escape small-town living is replaced by a matured ache of homesickness. We are witness to the ingenuity and determination of making-do. Of making something—anything—everything out of nothing.

With Wait Til I Get Over, Jones forges something undeniably novel out of enduring, existential themes like faith, love, and self-worth.

There’s no room for nonbelievers here.  
credits

released May 5, 2023

Produced by Durand Jones, Ben Lumsdaine, Drake Ritter
Recorded by Ben Lumsdaine at Russian Recording in Bloomington Indiana
Assistant Engineered by Jozef Caldwell
Mixed by Ben Lumsdaine
Mastered by Heba Kadry, NYC
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