My new album, "only the love songs", is now on Soundcloud. It's the latest in a series that began last year, as I set out to release online the best songs I have written over the last 50 years – none of them having got onto the radar screen of the public before. Some I already had good recordings of, but many needed to be recorded for the first time. The project continues...!

BIO:
In his mid-20’s, grad student J.M. Kearns was bitten by the songwriting virus, planted by the insidious influence of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and other reprobates. He wrote his first song after getting his heart broken on a canoe trip, and after that the songs just kept coming. So he ditched a future in academic philosophy, and thumbed his way to Los Angeles, where songwriting was hot.

In L.A. there were a couple of near-breakthroughs — an audition at Electra-Asylum Records, a song meeting with Warren Beatty — but then things got real. Kearns had to eat. He worked as a house painter, then a telegram-singing donkey, and then he really hunkered down, as a bureaucrat at a huge downtown law firm, exchanging molecules with tall office buildings. He did a lot of writing and recording, but not a lot of performing.

That changed when he moved to Nashville. After a thousand writers’ nights, he was given his first real gig, an 8:30 slot at a notorious club called the Gold Rush. Good things started to happen. Kearns found his mojo as a performer and a band formed around him, dubbed the Lonely Mammals. In 2007 he issued a CD with them called Death or Life, and Elmore magazine gave it a rave review. Also that year, his novel The Deep End was published (https://www.amazon.com/Deep-End-J-M-Kearns/dp/1500502707 ). And five of Kearns’ songs were recorded by independent artists. 

In 2010, pursued by a giant snowstorm with his cat in an old Ford hemorrhaging oil, Kearns made the move to Cape May, a sunny beach town at the southern tip of New Jersey, where he performs in a trio called The Squares with his partner Debra Donahue and their friend M.Q. Murphy. And of course, he keeps writing songs. Oddly, his life’s circle became unbroken when a musician friend got him a job teaching philosophy at a nearby university. In May 2024 Kearns released his first solo album, Before the coffee gets too cold.

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