We Speak Indie Artist
Americana Newcomer JP Oldfield Makes A Case For Listening To An EP Properly
Music is increasingly consumed one track at a time. A song gets saved, shuffled, clipped, recommended and replaced. JP Oldfield’s Saltwater Gospel belongs to a different tradition.
Out now through Now Listen, it is built around a six-part story, so chopping it into isolated pieces changes what the release is doing. The Ferryman at the centre of the EP is not simply a character appearing in a few songs. His decisions carry from one track into the next, and the consequences accumulate.
That gives the tracklist a useful sense of progression.
“It’s Just Begun” establishes the situation. “The Preacher’s Noose” takes the Ferryman further into revenge and religious conflict. “Wash Me Away” pushes the story towards the water, while “Further from Heaven” widens the picture with the angel and the approaching flood. The final two tracks deal with what follows.
Oldfield is asking the listener to follow a sequence rather than cherry-pick the obvious single.
The subject matter helps. This is a story filled with burial, storms, scripture, punishment and death, so individual songs naturally raise questions that are answered later. Even the title points towards a larger idea, with the sea representing a force that operates according to its own cycles.
There is also no attempt to hide the fact that this is an independent project. Oldfield wrote the songs, created the linocut artwork and developed the mythology himself.
That combination makes Saltwater Gospel feel designed for an audience willing to give the whole release its proper running time.
In a culture that increasingly rewards the quickest possible listen, there is something appealing about an EP that says: start at track one and stay with it.
Some performers sing to an audience. Jasmine Kara took hers by the hand and never let go. Headlining FENIX Rising at the Triad Theater, Kara delivered the kind of performance that reminds a room why live music still matters, a set so charged with charisma that by the end of the night there was no longer any line between the stage and the seats. The Triad belonged to her, and everyone in it knew it.
From the moment she stepped into the light, Kara carried herself like a superstar who had been waiting her whole life for exactly this room. There was no easing in, no cautious warm-up. She met the audience head-on, locking eyes with the crowd, drawing them into every lyric, and turning an intimate theater into an arena-sized experience without ever losing the closeness that makes the Triad so special.
Then she did what headliners dream of and few dare to attempt. Kara left the stage behind and took the show directly to the people, dancing on the tables as the room erupted around her. Drinks were lifted out of harm’s way, phones shot into the air, and the audience rose to its feet as she moved through the theater, singing inches from faces that could hardly believe their luck. It was reckless, joyful, and utterly magnetic, the kind of moment that turns a concert into a story people will be telling for years.
What set the performance apart was not simply the spectacle but the connection behind it. Kara engaged with her audience at every turn, feeding off their energy and giving it back tenfold. She did not perform at the crowd so much as with it, and the room answered in kind, cheering, clapping, and dancing along until the Triad felt less like a venue and more like a celebration she had personally invited everyone to attend.
FENIX Rising, the live performance series developed under FENIX360, exists to give independent artists a stage worthy of their talent. Jasmine Kara took that stage, and the tables, and the entire room, and made it unmistakably her own. If this was a glimpse of where she is headed, the rooms are about to get much bigger, and the audiences inside them had better be ready to dance.
Photo Credit: Max Flores
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