Jeremy Moses Curtis — “Moses” to his bandmates — is better known for his work as the bassist for artists as diverse as Booker T, Twinemen, Jeffrey Foucault, Kris Delmhorst, Caitlin Canty, and Chris Smither, or as the composer in the instrumental band Thank God For Science. A musician par excellence, a card-counter, the minister of the low end.

But in the spring of 2022, Curtis approached his old friend and road companion Kris Delmhorst to help him shepherd a pile of his own songs into the world. A series of observations, reflections, love letters to the times lived through and the people loved along the way, Midlife Chrysler is the fruit of that collaboration.

Drawing from a chaotic and peripatetic childhood, twenty-five years in the tour bus, the vagaries of marriage and fatherhood, the right drugs and the wrong ones, Curtis turns in a collection of songs that inhabit the borderland of memory and forgiveness.

In ten starkly rendered songs Midlife Chrysler locates the tension between here and gone, love and motion, music and silence, work and calling in a country where the exceptions make all the rules, and everything feels like a racket, except music. The big mystery, the one that still brings people together.

Hari is following