Jason Karaban - Awhile (Forty4)

Terms such as singer-songwriter, folk musician, acoustic player, and the like are thrown about with ubiquity in today’s music world and are often attached to artists who struggle to live up to even those broad definitions. With Jason Karaban, however, the opposite is true. Such terms aren’t descriptive enough to do justice to the music he makes. Yes, he is a singer-songwriter, a folk-infused player, and a maker of, broadly speaking, acoustic music, but none of this helps capture the deftness and delicacy with which he performs these sonic acts.

Awhile, his latest ep, or mini-album (I never know where the borderline is), is six tracks of understated songwriting at its finest. Driven mainly by his warm and welcoming voice and restrained acoustic rhythms or chiming piano, the songs are adorned only sparingly with blues electric guitar lines, drifting pedal steel, emotive strings inclusions, an unfussy beat, and little else.

And such spaciousness, such room for everything to breathe, allows additional atmospheres to percolate and pool between the notes and in the pauses between the vocals. It is what adds additional grace to opener “All the Love Your Heart Can Hold,” heightens the emotion of recent single “Can’t Trust You With My Heart,” turns “Whatever You Want“s drifting sonics into a driving force, it’s what makes “Watch Out” the perfect anthemic finale.

It seems that you can’t throw a ukulele or a wide-brimmed hat, a capo, or a book on drop D tuning into an open mic night these days without hitting a gap-year troubadour or would be singer-songwriter waxing lyrical about love and loss and longing, courtesy of their 19 years on this earth. Well tell them to play Awhile a few times; hopefully, when they see where the benchmark really is, they will give up and go back to working as a barista or making craft beer for a living.

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