LA-based Stephen Jaymes is a punk poet; a wounded-romantic; a sonic noir auteur and a post-apocalyptic hippie. This month Stephen welcomes a new era of sharply-focused creativity with CHIEF INSPECTOR, the first in a series of four singles seeding a path to a debut full-length album next year. CHIEF INSPECTOR is a doppelgänger noir in which the detective becomes the hunted, the eventual victim of his earlier foolish desire to lock a part of himself up. “I didn’t know what I was writing at first, but it turned out to be a kind of warning and a piece of advice, and it turned out I was talking to myself. I think now I was hearing from the part of me that was unhappy that I hadn’t really been making music in awhile. So I rectified that, and now we’re closer than we’ve ever been.”

Chief Inspector

“This is a knock on the window of reality,” sings Stephen Jaymes on his new single TOKYO. The second in his suite of four summer singles, TOKYO is a rousing call to make the journey to a magical place that two people create together, even in the face of certain climate destruction. TOKYO drops just a month after Jaymes made his summer debut with “Chief Inspector,” a song Divine Magazine says is “a testament to Jaymes’ artistic prowess and his ability to craft music that resonates deeply within the listener’s soul.” Pivoting from the shadowy noir of the first single, TOKYO declares its intention to make your head bob from the opening guitar riff. “The Tokyo of this song is not the Japanese city. It’s a place that exists between two people, an avenue for transcendence, and in this case transcending the apocalyptic scenes that make up most of what a conscious person witnesses this year. It feels like a future song to me as a listener, like Tokyo the Japanese doesn’t exist by the time the singer is inviting his lover to go there with him. Maybe to him it’s just a mythical a name from the pre-apocalyptic past picked up along the way.”

Tokyo

VIRUS VACCINE is the new single from Stephen Jaymes, the LA-based singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who’s already released two major tracks this summer. After the psychological noir “Chief Inspector” (a “folk punk opus that transcends boundaries” ~Divine Magazine) and the post-apocalyptic anthem ‘Tokyo’ (“the folk rock hit we needed!” ~Modern Mystery Music Blog), VIRUS VACCINE is a wry, would-be recovery ballad that finds humor in what Jaymes perceives as our collective failure at being able to tell what is good for us. “Whatever else the last few years have taught us, we’ve indisputably learned that we are actually terrible at understanding ourselves and how we work on the inside. As I worked on VIRUS VACCINE and discovered what it was about, the verses all emanated from the core story of a man who is accidentally curing himself to death, spiritually speaking. He believes his emotional reactions to a situation are symptoms of a mindset he can ‘get over’. So like the old exposure therapy sessions where patients would have to face their phobias of spiders or pillowcases in order to be cured, the singer stays in a bad situation in order to develop immunity. But you can’t become immune to yourself. You end up curing yourself to death. Often that’s tragic, but often it plays out as a comedy. The key to keeping the comic angle was realizing almost immediately that I was writing something in the tradition of Randy Newman or later Leonard Cohen. Usually I shy away when I hear an overt influence in something I’m writing. I correct away from it, or hide it more. But this time I leaned in and made it almost an homage. Then later, I realized I owe a huge debt to the Phil Ochs track ‘Pretty Smart on My Part’, a sendup of toxic masculinity way, way ahead of its time and still way, way relevant.”

Virus Vaccine

Stephen Jaymes, the folk-punk hero intent on saving the human race, has released a new single that describes the part of the human brain that refuses help. Even when it knows the help is genuine. There’s a part of the brain that still refuses help even after the rest of our brain has accepted that it’s real. 

Stephen has named that part of the human brain ‘Baby,’ and he has noticed that Baby prefers suffering over healing, and Baby doesn’t care if you have to suffer right along with Baby.

The song is called BABY CAN’T BE HELPED. On the cover, Stephen is seen in a baby outfit, his mohawk peaking through the baby bonnet on his head, a baby bottle in one hand, his body engaged in what looks like an absolute tantrum.

After asking the world if last summer was, in fact, the Last Predictable Summer (it was), Stephen is now asking the world, are we in the hands of Baby? Does the Baby who can’t be helped, who refuses even the smartest answers and the clearest paths forward, have a stranglehold on our future?

A lot of people feel this way right now, especially after a brutal January delivered too much bad news for the future of the planet. Stephen Jaymes can hear their cry, and he wants them to know that he sees Baby too, and he wants us to turn that part of our brain off as best we can. BABY CAN’T BE HELPED is part of a bigger message Stephen is bringing to the world that he calls #VISION2025. It’s a response to that other plan that starts in 2025, and it’s much more sustainable and peaceful and human-centered.

Stephen really believes the human nervous system has been designed to experience the ultimate high. The high that bests all other highs. It beats every drug, and every wonderful natural drug we can think of, from the high of romance to the high of parenthood to the high of ultimate personal achievement. He believes that when we all turn our consciousness now, when the planet is collapsing into actual throes of dying, to the idea of making every individual on the planet healthy and safe, we will experience a permanent, renewable, world-changing high that is worth going for just because it will feel so good.

The greatest high the human nervous system can possibly achieve is called peace on Earth, and Stephen Jaymes believes that one or two billionaires out there will realize, hungrily, that they want this feeling. Stephen is on a mission for the rest of us to show them what that’s like, and he’s beginning to draw in real followers with his sincere, science-baed, hopeful message.

BABY CAN’T BE HELPED is a folk-punk analysis of the force we are temporarily ruled by, here now in the real swing of the Sixth Extinction. The force we have to face and overcome, just as Harry did Voldemort, and Luke did Vader before him, and with all the same minimal mathematical probabilities their stories convey.

The song opens with a heavy rock chord progression played in a gentle way, perfectly preparing us for this Baby side of the human personality. We hear a raging storm that can’t quite make the noise it wants to because…it’s a baby. Stephen’s voice joins the jam with an assured, relaxed delivery that conveys the head-shaking concern of a doctor trying to be helpful and failing.

In the choruses, BABY CAN’T BE HELPED takes a nice bluesy turn that builds up chord change upon chord change, delivering the hope and aspiration of a great urge to help with a breakthrough, only to fall back into the realization that, yes, this does indeed seem like a pointless effort.

But pointlessness is not the message. Stephen is telling you to gear up for battle. Go to battle with this pointlessness, this Baby who refuses all good answers. Notice it, recognize it, fight it, and fight it with a plan. 

Having pointed a wry finger at the Baby part of the human experience that helps explain what we are dealing with, Stephen Jaymes marches on with VISION2025, offering real hope in the face of the global menace that is…the BABY who CAN’T BE HELPED. 

Baby Can't Be Helped

Stranded

Last Predictable Summer

The Evidence Against Her

Waiting For The Drugs To Kick In

Saving Daylight

When I Was Young

Well, it’s happening finally. Here we are. It’s looking bleak. Are you WAITING FOR THE DRUGS TO KICK IN?

We artists and lovers of music are wondering what to do in a time when hate claims victory. Stephen Jaymes feels your trauma. He really does. His blog readers and his fast-growing TikTok audience know that he’s trying to use awesome American music to save America and the world.

That’s why he released Baby Can’t Be Helped just a few weeks ago. To announce to other empaths: I feel your trauma, I see the angry babies. I am diagnosing Baby Brain Syndrome and prescribing 1,000mL of round-the-clock awesome American music therapy.

That was just a few short weeks ago. But now it’s now. We’re moving fast.

Having identified the phenomenon we need to heal, Stephen turns his attention to addressing your trauma so you can help save America, too. Because we’re not going to get through this if we don’t understand that the endless, senseless, repetitions of disagreement, from the bedroom to the battlefields, cause the kind of trauma that needs to be healed.

Fact is, you cannot witness love being sucked into a black hole of anti-love without a little boost.

Stephen isn’t really saying the drugs have to be actual drugs. It’s a joke, a metaphor.

Whatever heals you, from James Baldwin to Frank Zappa to Martha Graham to Moby Dick to the Bible to meditation to standup. We use our creative medicines to recapture our hope and let it grow again inside, protected from the onslaught of death rhetoric and cruel images.

Reading WAITING FOR THE DRUGS TO KICK IN from the romantic perspective, you can hear a man who’s at the end of a long, repetitive argument that went nowhere and accomplished nothing, other than making it hard for him to love his doll.

Or the needles he sticks in. He can’t love those, either. Again, not drugs, but yes a double entendre. It’s a voodoo doll. Get it? Fighting this void of love with hate, even voodoo hate in good conscience, is just gonna make us all more tired and more defeated. Not the way.

So we have to back up and realize that we’re fighting a psychological condition that is appropriately labeled learned helplessness.

We have to shake off the helplessness that is trying to bury us. The first step is recognizing that we’re not going to engage in debate anymore with that helplessness. We’re going to take care of ourselves now. Fighting the way we’ve been fighting is pointless. Fighting is what they expect, and it literally feeds them. Fighting won’t bring love.

So we switch strategy. Reading WAITING FOR THE DRUGS TO KICK IN from the political perspective, we notice that the arguing about policy is getting us nowhere but more divided. So divided that unelected folks wearing human baby shields boss our president around.

We need a new ending. At the end of time, after all the endless cycles of violence have repeated endlessly to infinity, we need a strategy that wins. So this apocalypse ends in peace instead of death.

Musically, WAITING FOR THE DRUGS TO KICK IN feels like a comical bar brawl where everyone laughs and nobody gets seriously hurt. The song plays against a warm, steady rhythm of ambient sounds that recall bottles toppling. It serves up the feeling of stopping in your tracks to realize you’re going nowhere, so you may as well head to the bar to get your strategy straight. You might even say it’s the song you sing to the bartender while you’re remapping your course.

WAITING FOR THE DRUGS TO KICK IN is a track for right now. People, especially empaths, are suffering hard. And there’s no way we’re going to get through this without understanding that healing ourselves has to happen first, before we can then unite to heal America. And don’t worry, Stephen’s got a plan for that, too. It’s called VISION2025 and he’s outlined it pretty clearly in his blog and now pretty entertainingly on TikTok.

So maybe saddle up to the bar and have a listen as your soul recalculates its position at the start of 2025...

“If folk-punk poetry had a name it would be Stephen Jaymes,” declared Kill the Music after he dropped three creatively explosive singles and music videos over the summer of 2023. It's now 2025 and SJ is about to drop his debut album, King Jaymes. A gifted multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, singer, and producer, Stephen is a self-contained artist. He might be described as Charles Bukowski ditching whiskey for psychedelic mushrooms while feverishly ingesting Rumi poetry and Phil Ochs records. He writes with a strutting, folk-punk sensibility, bringing to life dark realities in order to highlight, with literate and lacerating lyrics, the brightness underneath.

Stephen’s voice draws comparisons to Iggy Pop, Ian McCulloch, and Gordon Lightfoot. His musical style has been compared to Elvis Costello, Beck, and T Rex. His lyrical style is reminiscent of Nilsson, Phil Ochs, and Leonard Cohen.

Popular tracks by Stephen Jaymes