Vibey Alt and Soft Rock

Stephen Jaymes, the folk punk hero hell-bent on saving the human race, is closing out 2025 by releasing his third new single after his debut album, King Jaymes, wowed critics at the start of the summer. That LP is now available as a hi fi digital package, with artwork and music videos bundled in, on his website. 

King Jaymes represents the culmination of two histories: the history of Stephen developing as an artist over a lifetime, and the history of Stephen tracing a path of unique singles and standout videos across two years to arrive fully formed in his debut.

The journey from the summer of 2023 to the summer of 2025 chronicled the crystallization of the Stephen Jaymes persona, the establishment of multiple unique and artful music video styles, and the development of a pristine acoustic rock sound he pursued with Serbian mixing engineer Zsolt Virag.

“This is a luminous, layered and emotionally articulate debut from an artist who has not just found his voice. He is founding a kingdom” (Cool Happy Genius Heroes). 

A gifted multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, singer, and producer, Stephen Jaymes is a self-contained artist. He might be described as Charles Bukowski ditching whiskey for psychedelic mushrooms while feverishly ingesting Rumi poetry, Jungian thought, and Phil Ochs records. He writes with a strutting, folk-punk sensibility, bringing to life dark realities in order to highlight, with a raised eyebrow, the brightness underneath.

This Is Stephen Jaymes

Cross Me Out

Stephen Jaymes, the folk-punk singer-songwriter who just last month captured the essence of spooky with his drop The Evidence Against Her (“Lyrically, Jaymes is at his poetic best and there is a strange push and pull feeling of being out of sync with his own muse” ~Independent Artist Buzz) is back again so soon with a new single that captures the predicament of holiday travel as well as the mood of much of the nation and the world right now. It’s called STRANDED. It’s a song about being ready to leave but never going. After the events of the past few weeks, some feel like time is a Möbius strip, or like the world is just spinning its wheels. Or that life has become a skipping record. Jaymes can relate, and STRANDED promises to fix that skip in the vinyl of life so you can rotate your way out of the blues. The mood here is light, hinting at holiday with a chiming glockenspiel, and the energy is infectious, urging the listener to sing along to a carol that essentially celebrates finding spiritual meaning in the act of running in place.

Stranded

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...

Waiting For The Drugs To Kick In

King Jaymes

When I Was Young

Only Light

Damn the Judgment

Rebel Heart Disguise

Poems, Prayers and Promises

Sunshine On My Shoulders

The Dark Side of the Moon

Breathe (In the Air)

Boys And Girls

Boys And Girls (Remastered 1999)

Immortalized

The Sound of Silence

“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.