The meteoric rise of J.M. Kearns 

April 1977. Driving cab in Toronto with a new PhD in hand, J.M. Kearns was at a crossroads. He’d been writing songs for five years, and it felt like a mission. He yearned to head for California where his kind of music was now in full bloom. On the other hand, a career in academic philosophy was the “expected” move. What to do? The songs won: he skipped town, thumbed his way to Los Angeles. At the outset there were startling near-breakthroughs — an audition for Electra-Asylum Records, a song meeting with Warren Beatty — but then life got real. A person has to eat. After a stint as a telegram-singing donkey, Kearns bit the bullet and became a bureaucrat ... exchanging molecules with huge office buildings. 

Meanwhile the songs just kept coming, folk-rock in the footsteps of Dylan, Prine, and Leonard Cohen. Some of them were about the secret thoughts of cubicle dwellers, some were about love and fear and time. And he was now recording them in his home studio. All very well, but there was something missing. Up to that point he had done a few open mics, but he had a bad case of stage fright, and Kearns the songwriter was not adequately represented by Kearns the performer. In fact the performer was nowhere. 

That changed when he moved to Nashville. After a thousand smoky writers’ nights, he was given his first real gig ever, at the tender age of 55 — an 8:30 slot that paid $27.50 on Friday nights at a notorious club called the Gold Rush. There, a band spontaneously formed around him, starting with ace percussionist Kathy Burkly (on an overturned water jug). Other members joined, the band was dubbed the Lonely Mammals. They built a cult following, mostly at Brown’s Diner, and Kearns finally found his natural, playful self as a performer. Good things started to happen. Five of his original songs were cut by independent artists. The Lonely Mammals issued a CD in 2007, and Elmore magazine gave it a rave review. Also that year, his novel The Deep End was published (you can find it here). But Kearns had gone for broke with his Nashville dream, and unfortunately he hit that target. In 2008 the bottom fell out.  

Narrowly avoiding homelessness, he drove 800 miles in an oil-hemorrhaging Ford Tempo to Cape May, a beach town at the southern tip of New Jersey, where his partner had just secured a job that came with a room to live in, one short block from the Atlantic. So Kearns formed a band called The Squares with that partner, Debra Donahue, and their friend M.Q. Murphy. Recorded a CD for them. And of course, kept writing songs. And oddly, his life’s circle became unbroken when a musician friend got him a job teaching philosophy at a nearby university.

Now in the prime of his 70’s, J.M. Kearns figures it is about time to release his first solo album. It drops on May 17th, 2024. It’s called Before the coffee gets too cold. Its 12 cuts include his latest original songs, as well as some that he wrote during the eras mentioned above. But most of the recordings were done in 2023. You can preview the album on our Music page, and you can access the full album on Bandcamp, with liner notes, credits, lyrics, and photos.

This album is the tip of an iceberg. In the next two years Kearns will release four more albums of songs that no one has heard. Songs of a lifetime, you could say.

A note from J.M. Kearns about BANDCAMP:

“I chose Bandcamp for this release, because they do a great job of presenting an album (ad-free, too), and because it’s the main site where, after listening, people are given a way to actually support independent artists, by the quaint practice of buying albums or single tracks that they like (very cheap — you can contribute more if you want to). So please give Bandcamp a whirl!”