J.M. Kearns’ insane project

During the Covid epidemic, aware of the fleeting years, long-time folk-Americana songwriter J.M. Kearns conceived the crazy project of releasing online the best songs he had written over the last 50 years – none of them having reached the radar screen of the larger public before. There were a lot of them. Some he already had good recordings of, but many (most) needed to be recorded for the first time. A monumental task, it turned out. But he plunged in, and his first solo album, Before the Coffee Gets too Cold, was released online in May 2024, and the second, Songs of Surviving in the City, in November that year. A third album, only the love songs, appeared on June 6, 2025, and on Sept. 11, 2026 his new album of story songs will be released: Tales of Two Cities. Bandcamp is where they all live, and they are also appearing on his YouTube channel as they are released.

KEARNS’ STORY:

In his mid-20’s, grad student J.M. Kearns was bitten by the songwriting virus, spurred on by his love of folk and traditional country, and people like John Prine and Gram Parsons. He wrote his first song after getting his heart broken on a canoe trip, and after that the songs just kept coming. So he ditched a future in academic philosophy, and thumbed his way to Los Angeles.

In L.A. there were a couple of near-breakthroughs — a promising audition at Electra-Asylum Records, a song meeting with Warren Beatty — but then things got real. Kearns had to eat. He worked as a house painter, then a telegram-singing donkey, and then he hunkered down as a bureaucrat at a huge downtown law firm, exchanging molecules with tall office buildings. He did a lot of writing and recording, but not a lot of performing. The secret reason: fear.

That changed when he moved to Nashville. After a hundred or so writers’ nights, he was given his first real gig, an 8:30 slot at a notorious club called the Gold Rush. Good things started to happen. Kearns found his mojo as a performer, and a band formed around him, dubbed the Lonely Mammals. In 2007 he issued a CD with them called Death or Life, and Elmore magazine gave it a rave review. Also that year, his novel The Deep End was published (you can find it here). And five of Kearns’ songs were recorded by independent artists. Unfortunately he had gone for broke with his Nashville dream and in the great crash of 2008, he hit that exact target: flat broke.

In 2010, with his cat at his side, pursued by a giant snowstorm in an old Ford hemorrhaging oil, Kearns made the move to Cape May, a sunny beach town at the southern tip of New Jersey, where he performs in a duo with his partner Debra Donahue. And of course, he keeps writing songs. Oddly, his life’s circle became unbroken when a musician friend got him a job teaching at a nearby university. In May 2024 Kearns released his first solo album, Before the coffee gets too cold. That was followed by two more (see Music page).

His latest album, Tales of Two Cities, releases on Sept. 11, 2026, and is now in preview on Bandcamp. It’s about L.A. and Nashville, cities he lived in not so long ago. Nearly all the tracks are true stories that transmuted themselves into songs, sometimes while the events were happening and sometimes more recently. Seven of the 10 songs are newly recorded in 2025-26; three tracks are recordings from the times when they were written.