‘Next Town’s Trees’ is an 8 track album by Boise indie-folk musician, Jesse Blake Rundle, produced with bandmate and engineer, Nate Agenbroad.

“I wrote these songs during a time of immense change in my life: I was finally leaving the church, uncovering my sexuality, starting my first relationship with a man, figuring out joy in sobriety, and settling into my life as a musician,” he says. Jesse explores themes of modern identity and self discovery with a poet’s eye for detail. His acute observations are capable of catharsis and comfort during dark times.

My second album, Next Town’s Trees, is finally ready for the world. I’m gonna say a lot more about it in the coming months. And everyone can hear it on March 3, 2023. There will be vinyl and cds and all that.

In March as the Covid-19 death counts just kept rising in the US and around the world, the numbers were getting to the point that they were hard to comprehend. Hard to connect to any individual people. The media also shifted story from the virus to the politics that circled it. Just another news cycle.

At the same time, I had thousands of dandelions growing in my backyard. I awoke one morning thinking of the callous the political responses, and how disconnected those actions and words are from the people they impact.

Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

I made a video for this song The Emperor of Ice-Cream, which is adapted from the Wallace Stevens poem.

Some backstory (the hearse at work)

In the parking lot at my day job, an ice cream truck is always parked. And, oddly enough, a hearse visits the office every afternoon to deliver mail. While out to pick up lunch, I kept encountering this hearse driving down the road but with no driver in the driver seat. Surreal, right? Well, the mailwoman is short, and like any good postal worker she delivered mail from the passenger seat.

About a year ago when I wrote this song I got the image stuck in my mind of a car chase between an ice cream truck and a hearse. The poem the song is based on, by Wallace Stevens, circles around the story of a wake for an old woman and her house filled with what seem like carousers at a party. There's both life and death mixed in throughout. Somehow this image arose.

“It sure does feel like this is an exercise in lifting spirits, even going to so far as encouraging those of a mind to sing-along. The pretty arrangements are able matched by the sweetly idiosyncratics vocals, which have more than a passing resemblance to ‘Barafundle’ era Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci. ‘Nomad Exquisite’ serves up so much a plate for us, sweet helpings containing soft vocal gestures that have genuine chamber pop allure. Huggable from start to finish via a Boise artist who is just who he is. KH”

I wrote this song a couple years ago on the stoop at my apartment in the Boise Northend. It all came together fast and felt right. This poem by Stevens, “Nomad Exquisite”, had a few lines in it that had captured my attention for a while and it felt good to find melody for them.

I like the twist in the poem from viewing the outside world, the palms and vines, and, while still enamored with it, then expressing what we so often feel inside, the flinging “forms, flames, and the flakes of flames.”