Michael Jarrett

The bar is about half full and Michael Jarrett is ending his set with the appropriately titled "Time to Go Home," the first cut from his debut album "Come On." A twenty-something woman with hoop earrings leans forward and taps her foot. Sitting beside her, a man in a baseball cap nurses the last of his Budweiser and looks from the girl to Jarrett and back again. The place is quiet, except for the sparsely strummed guitar and the distinctly unmusical sound of a bartender dragging a garbage can. Jarrett leans into the microphone for the last verse, intently staring at the space between my table and the next, and sings, "You put your hand on my shoulder, and whispered it's time to go home."

The last chord is strummed and the audience begins clapping. The girl with the hoop earrings is smiling wide and the man sitting with her, downs the rest of his beer and grabs his coat. It's time to go home.

Home for Jarrett is a single-wide trailer on the outskirts of Austin, TX. When I arrived there the day before, 30 minutes late for the interview we'd scheduled, I apologized and blamed a wrong turn. "Hey, no sweat," he said, welcoming me in, "I forgot what time you said you were coming."

Michael Jarrett is 31 years old, but looks more like 25. He's tall and thin; his dusty blonde hair cut short and neat. He wears snap shirts, Wranglers, and the old fashioned Hush Puppy boots, not out of odd nostalgia or some affinity with the Texas mystique, but rather "because they're comfortable." It's as simple as that. And Jarrett's songs - often probing, humorous and tender all at the same time - are characterized by the same simple idea. They work because they're true, they're genuine, and, in short, they're comfortable.

In his thick Georgia drawl, he asks if I'd like some wine and motions toward the couch, clearing a place among various books on spirituality, a few novels, and compilations of short stories (a collection of Flannery O'Conner among others). I'd heard his first album, "Come On," which I thought was a great debut into the songwriter society, but I was ill prepared to ask anything more than the standard "who are your influences?" type questions.

"Nice place you got here," I said, as he offered me the wine in a coffee mug.

"Yeah man, I live here for free." He went into the story, which explained my driving through a subdivision of multi-million dollar houses to arrive at a dirt road and a mobile home trailer. Like all the stories I was to hear, it was ridiculous but I knew it was true.

Michael grew up in Columbus, GA in a family with three younger brothers. His college years took him to southeastern Tennessee and it was there that he began his songwriting. After college, he bounced around Texas and back to Tennessee, working on ranches, in bars and for a high-school ministry, before ending up in Austin late in 1999.

Since then, it would still be difficult to say that Michael calls anywhere home. "I woke up here this morning," was his response to how long he might continue to live in Austin. It is this seemingly nonchalant approach to life that is belied in his songs. With a catalogue that far exceeds the 25 recordings, clarity, poignancy and attention to detail have become the identifying marks of Michael's songwriting.

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How long have you been playing music?

I got a guitar for Christmas when I was in high-school. I didn't really play a whole lot then but... I have horrible rhythm and so I was trying to play and I couldn't strum a song to save my life and so I learned these finger-picking patterns like you might hear sometimes in folk music and stuff and I learned to play these patterns because they had a natural rhythm to 'em so I could kinda fake it. But really, I didn't play much at all, I didn't write anything in high-school and then in college, a good friend of mine and I, the very first week I was up there at Sewanee, we got together and we were playing. Well we'd try to play together, he had really good rhythm and I'd try to follow along but actually it took me about three years after that, and that was playing regularly in college, it took me about three years before I could play a song that wasn't mine because I didn't have the rhythm to follow along. I don't know, I still have pretty poor rhythm. I have a good friend who's a drummer and he definitely agrees.

When did you realize you wanted to be a songwriter?

Actually, I went to school to be... I don't even know if I'd say right now that I want to be a songwriter. I don't like get up in the morning and think, you know "OK, I'm a songwriter." I mean I work hard for that and I work hard to get the shows but I do so many other things. I spent like six months in Mexico this summer and I travel around doing jobs here and there. And I play music all the time and it's just kinda part of who I am, I don't know, it's not something that I just felt like "hey," you know, "I'm gonna try this vocation for a while." It' - Playgrounds Magazine