There’s a particular kind of country song that only becomes available to a writer after enough years have gone by. It isn’t necessarily a song about getting older, though age inevitably hangs around its edges. It’s a song about acquiring enough distance from your former selves to recognize that they were strangers, too—people who made decisions on your behalf and left you to discover what those decisions meant.
Jeremy Parsons writes five variations on that idea on Life, a compact EP about time, growth, failure, empathy and the complicated business of becoming somebody.
Parsons, a San Antonio native whose music occupies the increasingly porous territory between country, folk and Americana, doesn’t approach these subjects like a man eager to announce that he’s figured everything out. That’s important. The least interesting songs about wisdom tend to be written by people desperate to demonstrate how much they’ve acquired.
Life is better because Parsons still has questions.
The first arrives with “Tickin’.” A clock on the wall becomes the simplest possible metaphor for mortality, but Parsons doesn’t turn it into melodrama. Time passes. That’s the fact. What interests him is what we do knowing that it does.
His argument that youth isn’t necessarily wasted if we learn from it establishes the EP’s philosophy. Parsons isn’t interested in undoing his mistakes. He wants to understand what they purchased.
That distinction becomes important on “The Garden.”
The song asks another person what’s growing in their garden, whether it withers when they’re feeling blue and whether visible flourishing might indicate something similar happening inside. Parsons’ father was a horticulturist, giving the metaphor an autobiographical foundation, but the writing works because he doesn’t overload it.
Seeds require tending. People do, too.
Some flourish.
Some don’t.
Patience matters.
Country music has always depended on physical things carrying emotional weight—a photograph, a kitchen table, an empty chair, a road home. Parsons’ garden belongs to that tradition. The image remains ordinary enough to believe in.
Then comes “Who Was I,” the EP’s centerpiece and Parsons’ finest piece of writing here.
He looks backward at 25 and finds no sepia-toned innocence. He remembers getting high, sleeping through days and living for nights, while his parents had already built the conventional adult life he hadn’t wanted.
They had a house and children. They finished school. They prayed.
Parsons wanted to sing.
There is a temptation in American roots music to treat such a choice as inherently heroic. The artist rejects conformity, heads toward Nashville and proves that following your dream is always preferable to accepting an ordinary life.
Parsons knows adulthood is messier.
He did go to Nashville. He didn’t conquer it. Eventually, at 32, he moved back in with his father.
And then he kept going.
That’s the important part.
Parsons wonders whether he’s chasing the dream or the dream is chasing him, and the question quietly dismantles a great deal of romantic mythology surrounding the musician’s life. A dream pursued long enough becomes something more complicated than ambition. It becomes obligation, identity and perhaps even habit. After enough miles, you may no longer remember what turning around would look like.
What makes “Who Was I” so affecting is that Parsons neither condemns nor celebrates the younger man. He’s simply astonished by him.
The kid survived.
The dream survived.
Somehow they’re both still here.
“Humanity” widens the lens. Parsons looks at division, judgment and people’s inability to listen to one another. The song could easily have become finger-pointing disguised as compassion, but he avoids that trap by admitting the limits of his own experience. He doesn’t know everything. He hasn’t suffered everything.
What he does know is that people have choices about what they cultivate.
Here, the seed imagery from “The Garden” returns. Good and bad seeds surround us. What grows depends partly upon what gets watered.
That thematic repetition helps Life feel like an EP rather than five songs sharing a release date.
The project closes with “Life Worth Dyin’ For,” a title big enough to collapse beneath its own seriousness. Instead, Parsons makes the song intimate.
He isn’t asking whether he became famous enough, rich enough or important enough.
Did he laugh?
Did he love?
Did he fall down and stand again?
When he could do something good, did he do it?
Parsons imagines reaching the end without bargaining against it because the life preceding death was sufficient. The sentiment could become greeting-card philosophy in less careful hands, but Life has already shown us the mistakes behind the conclusion. Parsons earns his optimism by refusing to pretend it came cheaply.
That may be the EP’s most appealing quality.
These aren’t songs about self-improvement in the contemporary sense. Parsons isn’t presenting a better version of himself for public consumption. He’s recognizing that every version remains part of the same person.
The reckless 25-year-old is still there.
So is the man who returned home at 32.
So is the son watching things grow.
So is the artist wondering whether the career he chose was also choosing him.
And now there’s the man capable of looking at all of them without demanding a verdict.
At five songs, Life doesn’t overstay its premise. It begins with the clock and ends contemplating the grave, but somehow the record isn’t morbid. Quite the opposite.
Parsons’ subject is the enormous stretch between those two points.
That’s where the gardens grow, the dreams disappoint, the people we love change, and the foolish young person we once were gradually becomes somebody we almost understand.
The clock keeps ticking.
Jeremy Parsons doesn’t claim he can stop it.
On Life, he’s simply determined to pay attention.
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