In the middle of a summer tour, soon after the release of his third album, The Reluctant Graveyad, singer and song-writer Jeremy Messersmith chilled and offered up some humorous and surprising insight into his music abilities, tour highlights (which include beignets), what would turn him into a hermit, and the magic of the world wide web. A sense of humbleness is never far from this artist, but when you’ve got his talent, which has been obvious since his first release in 2006, it’s almost unnecessary.

Hyde Walker: So! How are you doing today? (laughs)

Jeremy Messersmith: (laughs) I’m great. I just played a show in Colorado Springs last night, and turns out I have some family here, so I’m crashing at my brother’s place today.

HW: Yeah, you sound very relaxed.

JM: Yeah. It’s nice. It’s nice not staying in a hotel room. That’s what’s really nice (laughs).

HW: I can imagine. And you are in a middle of a tour. How is that going, hotel rooms aside?

JM: Uh, hotel rooms aside it’s been really fun. I got to play pretty much all over the country with a couple of exceptions, and I’ve especially enjoyed being on the West Coast because I’ve never played there at all, and I’ve had a chance to go through and play there at least a couple of times now.

HW: Awesome! So just through the tour and everything, do you have any favorite cities or venues?

JM: There’s been a few. I played at this place called the Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco a couple of times and those have both been really great shows. It’s also great getting to spend some time in San Francisco. I really liked it a lot. Portland is also pretty great as well as far as a city to spend some time in. Plus they have that Voodoo Donuts place which is pretty incredible.

HW: Voodoo Donuts…why does that sound so familiar to me? I feel like I’ve seen that featured on Food Network or something (laughs).

JM: I think it has been actually (laughs). It’s actually this donut shop where they have, uh…it’s just like they sprinkle all sorts of crazy stuff onto donuts, like oreos or bacon or, I don’t know, it’s just uh…

HW: Yes. Yes, as soon as you said bacon! (laughs). This was definitely featured on Food Network! I recall this, I definitely recall this.

Now, your most recent release, The Reluctant Graveyard, would you say you’ve stepped in a new direction musically with it?

JM: Um…it feels like it was sort of a logical extension of where I’ve been headed for a couple of years. Like my first record was mainly acoustic, and it was me kind of sitting down in my basement writing songs and recording them, and then my second record was – all the songs kind of started from that, me playing acoustic guitar, but then we sort-of learned how to actually add production, and add drums, and all this other stuff.

With the new one it’s mainly band stuff, so not really a lot of acoustic guitar. There’s a few tracks on there, but for the most part it felt like this was the learning-how-to-play-with-a-band record.

HW: Ok (laughs).

JM: And I really didn’t do demos or anything of songs. I wrote them and I brought them to, you know, kind of the band, and we sat down and interpreted them together which was kind of a big change.

Like on The Silver City, some of the songs on there are basically just the demo tracks with production, and some other stuff on them, but we didn’t really take that approach for this one. So it felt like it was just a logical extension of I guess where it’s sort of been headed.

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