There are records born from ego, there are records born from accident, and then there are records born from necessity—the kind of necessity that stirs in the pit of your gut when the world outside is collapsing in on itself and the only therapy left is to bleed into song.
Jeremy Parsons’ Life is that record. Five songs carved from pandemic silence, long road miles, and the bewilderment of waking each day to a headline that felt like a sci-fi nightmare.
And yet, instead of breaking him, it honed him. Parsons leans into the storm with this EP, coming out not unscarred, but awake.
‘ Tickin’ opens the collection like a clock face pressed against your chest.
A meditation on time’s unstoppable march, it pulses with the urgency of a man who has seen what wasted years can do but also what transformation feels like. Parsons’ voice carries a worn but unbroken quality, like weathered leather stretched tight over steel. The message isn’t subtle: your time’s running down, so what the hell are you going to do with it?
Then there’s ‘The Garden,’ a piece of quiet philosophy disguised as a country-folk hymn. It’s Parsons as the horticultural son—his father, Dr. Jerry Parsons, was a horticulturist—and the metaphor blossoms into something more than plant life. This is about tending to yourself, nurturing resilience, and watching the fruits of patience pay off. The refrain—“I hope that means you are too”—isn’t just lyric, it’s a benediction.
‘Who Was I’ is the gut punch. A confessional that smells like stale beer, bus station air, and the kind of insomnia where you replay your twenties like a busted cassette. Parsons doesn’t romanticize the years of drifting and self-destruction; he dissects them.
“Sometimes I wonder who’s chasing who, me or the dream,” he sings, and you can hear the weight of Nashville rejection in the crack of his delivery. It’s an anthem for anyone who’s ever had the audacity to measure themselves against the ghosts of their parents’ stability.
The emotional temperature spikes with ‘Humanity,’ a song that feels less like personal therapy and more like a sermon shouted from a mountaintop.
Parsons indicts the judgmental, the blind, the complacent. He calls out the withered souls who confuse wealth with wisdom. It’s a plea, maybe even a demand, for empathy in a time when voices drown each other out in the endless static of digital noise. There’s grit in his phrasing, but beneath it, a raw ache that longs for connection.
And then, the curtain closes with ‘Life Worth Dyin’ For.’
The title itself reads like the thesis of Parsons’ journey. This isn’t morbid fascination; it’s acceptance, even gratitude.
He sings of laughter, love, and resilience with the clarity of a man who’s seen too many funerals to take one more sunrise for granted. The song swells with catharsis—Parsons’ attempt to etch on his own epitaph: “Oh, I lived a life worth dying for.” It doesn’t get more honest than that.
Life isn’t flashy. It’s not trying to reinvent the Americana wheel. What it does is rarer—it tells the truth. In five songs, Jeremy Parsons takes you through time, regret, growth, anger, and gratitude. It’s an EP built on scars, stitched together with hope. And in the quietest moments, it reminds you that music, when wielded by someone unafraid to bleed, is the closest thing we have to salvation.
Life drops on September 19th on MTS Records.
