#48 Jeremy Warmsley

With his tiny glasses and his ad hoc sweatshirt, you wouldn’t think he’d lead the way with abounding measure. This is what we were thinking as Vincent and Lara were being patronized by some church guy who wasn’t too proud of his temper. But as we hit the play button, and Jeremy began to sing, things turned out far different than imagined.

The clergyman didn’t want anything to do with it, so instead he would sing at the doors of the church so that he could be heard from far off. Moreover, he would sing as if the song, Dirty Blue Jeans, were the only thing that mattered, the only thing that merited existence. The song lives in him, surrounds him, presses his voice to the limits, dissolves everything in its way, and draws in the camera as if it were the seething heart of a storm.

This is Jeremy: a guy who loves chocolate filled cakes, fears nothing, and believes in what he does.

Jeremy Warmsley is a simple story of a guy who doesn’t like the guitar as much as he does the piano or experimenting with electronics. A guy who, when you talk to him about The Divine Comedy, responds with chatter about The Knife, who he believes was the biggest sensation of last year. A guy who doesn’t like the guitar but still managed to renew our faith in an old formula we thought we had exhausted: a solo singer with six strings. Simply because he sings with a spite, an ardor, and a naturalness that’s rarely encountered.

Watch the video “5 Verses.” Watch Jeremy walk, his gaze stretching far ahead, erasing all context. He doesn’t even stall when Vincent Moon steps off the track to catch a young boy smile, later letting the camera drop in order to catch back up. When Warmsley sings, he refuses to hesitate, and we follow suite with the same contagious certainty.

Thanks to Matt Evans for the translation