Mason Jennings Heads Towards In the Ever

words by Brian Kenney

  After over a decade in the business, folk balladeer Mason Jennings is starting to see the yin and yang of it all. The seasoned singer-songwriter, who is both a soft-spoken spirit in his off-stage demeanor and an off-the-cuff comic crooner when he takes the stage, sees life as both sides of the same coin. It’s a veteran sense of self that comes with age and wisdom. "When I made my first record, I wasn't really thinking about much except making a cool-sounding record," Jennings muses on the day after In the Ever, his sixth full-length release, hit the shelves. "Now it's a lot harder to quiet down and trust your own voice. And that's what I'm trying to do. It certainly gets more challenging because you have more life experiences." Yes, the world he has seen has made him a spiritual person, and if 2006's Boneclouds was a quest to find his spirituality in the tornado that is life in the new millennium, then his latest disc, In the Ever, questions his role in a natural world which constantly dukes it out between the forces of dark and light.