Cincinnati Musician Jeremy Harrison Forges Solo Path (2025)

Jeremy Harrison has self-deprecating, perhaps unfairly harsh observations on his contributions to Cincinnati's music scene over the past two decades. He summarizes his time with hard rock sleaze masters Banderas and the nuanced but still louder-than-God's-wrath Honeyspiders with surprising humility.

"I'm always the shittiest musician in the room, but I'd have some good ideas," Harrison says over beers at the Northside Yacht Club, the skilled mixologist's employer. "I occasionally caught lightning in a bottle. I just wasn't good at juggling."

Harrison's self-criticism may be undercut by his debut solo album, Songs of Love and Blight. Expectations for tumultuous rock dissolve in sonic waves of atmospheric texture and the tension between mildly claustrophobic intimacy and mind-melting expansiveness. Discarding established blueprints, Harrison's solo approach is contemplative introspection through a mixture of noisy sound collage, mesmerizing drone and a slightly hallucinatory psych-folk melodicism.

"This album let me utilize what I'm better at," says Harrison. "I recorded it very lo-fi. I wanted it to feel intimate, like a handwritten letter or a mixtape where someone wrote songs for you. I purposely left in a lot of tape hiss and mistakes, because that feels more intimate and urgent. I end up falling in love with demos more so than the finished product. There's a little magic in there that gets scooped out when you clean everything up. I didn't want to lose that. If I did anything right, I did that."

Part of Songs of Love and Blight's appeal is its organic evolution. The album was conceived five years ago during COVID's forced isolation, and while some artists were creatively blocked by the lockdown's solitude, Harrison embraced it.

"Like everyone's hare-brained idea, it started because you're sitting around in your underwear with nothing to fucking do," says Harrison. "I was living alone. I was thriving. I didn't have any creative pursuits, I was focused on making cocktails. The first song started as an exercise, like, 'Why don't I try to make a song?' I had no intention of doing a record."

That lack of intention fueled Harrison's work ethic, freeing him to experiment with approach and execution. Ultimately, Harrison perceived an actual album taking shape.

"I had so much fun making the first song, 'Crook of Rain,'" Harrison recalls. "Then I was dicking around and the beginning of another song started. I had two or three songs for a while, and suddenly I'm thinking, 'What if I made a record?' That's when it got really fun, because I established a language for what kind of songs I could do. I wanted a merging of this otherworldly but folkish feeling, like things were coming from this great other, mixed with a guy with an acoustic guitar. Then it came to how they felt as a collection and what's missing. It went from writing a couple of songs to almost like writing a script."

As an actual album vision coalesced, Harrison set vision parameters. His first requirement for Songs of Love and Blight was limiting the album's size without narrowing its scope.

"I wanted it around 30 minutes," he says. "I didn't want it to be too short, like Jeremy made an EP. I wanted a full record, but I didn't want The Lord of the Rings. The most beautiful songs have this air of mystery because they're short, like ‘Teenage Kicks’ by the Undertones. It's like seeing someone attractive on the bus and your head fills with ideas of who they could be to you. Next thing you know, they're gone. And that's nice, that fleeting bittersweet moment that you keep replaying. I wanted these songs to have that effect on people."

During the album's evolution, Harrison felt guided by environmental influences rather than musical inspirations. The first of those was lockdown's liberation from the daily grind.

"With the free time, I was occupied, tinkering with things, having the chance to be creative," he says. "To not be too tired or hungover or feel like, 'I could start that right now, but by the time I get really into it, I've got to go to work.' It was time to let things be and not to have ambition or intention."

The other inspiration was his move to Milford to inherit his parents' home after his father's passing and his mother's relocation to a smaller living situation. Harrison's father is buried in the cemetery across the street.

"I can open the door and see him there. There's a weird, bittersweet comfort in that," says Harrison. "Walking around that neighborhood is like a Lifetime movie. There are little breaks of nature that you don't get in the city. That got the juices flowing."

Harrison ultimately decided to banner the album with his name rather than shield himself with an anonymous project identity. It was less about self-aggrandizement and more about the artist's and the art's vulnerability.

"This is what I've always been, I just never had the opportunity to show it," says Harrison. "These are things I listen to at home, this is what I write when I'm not prompted or working in the confines of other ideas. I didn't want some ethereal project name because this feels personal. I played, wrote, recorded everything on the record, for good and bad. If there's one bad song, it's my bad song. I can't be like, 'The drummer really wanted that fucking song.' There's no place to hide. That's scary, but it's also really rewarding."

Songs of Love and Blight actually dropped on Bandcamp last September with little fanfare or promotion. The album came to the attention of Polina Bespalko, director of the Xavier Music Series at Xavier University, who enthusiastically contacted Harrison about including him in the series.

"Polina called and said, 'This music is fantastic. I want to feature you in our music series,'" says Harrison. "I was like, 'That's weird, but I don't know when this will ever happen again, so okay.'"

Harrison now has to validate that "okay." He's prepping intensely solo material for presentation in a full band format for an immersive show at Radio Artifact on April 11. That process often leads to uncovering the material's forgotten or unnoticed elements, but Harrison dismantled and reassembled the songs until nothing remained unknown within them.

"It's hammered into my head, really," he says. "It was going over everything with a fine-toothed comb, and it was strictly me. I sucked all the marrow out of it. All the self-reflection has been reflected."

Harrison is incredibly enthusiastic about the live version of Songs of Love and Blight, particularly because of the stage talent he's gathered. His older brother, Chris, will provide guitar as he did with Banderas and Honeyspiders; their multi-instrumentalist Banderas bandmate, Todd McHenry, who also mastered Love and Blight, will serve as the bassist; and drums will be provided by Cruel Age beatkeeper Oliver Mungin.

Harrison is perhaps most excited by the inclusion of musical polymath/Jess Lamb collaborator Warren Harrison, no relation but a renowned local figure that Harrison has long wanted to work with himself.

"We joked about having a band called Harrison Squared, but now with Chris, we could call it Harrison Cubed," he says with a laugh. "Warren is a sweetheart."

The Radio Artifact show promises to be a multimedia extravaganza. Visual artist Ian Hayes will provide old-school live video manipulations projected behind the band, and Harrison says they'll be experimenting with set design, perhaps even a scent-based component. He's excited about the studio-to-stage arrangements for material that was never intended to have an audience.

"It's all coming back around," says Harrison. "It was like, 'Yeah, I can do this all by myself,' and now it's, 'I did all that, now I need my guys really bad.' We've expanded and fleshed the songs out. This record was supposed to sound intimate, but I wanted things to feel bigger live."

As Harrison plans for Songs of Love and Blight's live debut and teases a second album, he still wrestles with his nascent solo career's reality.

"I don't have a name that screams 'solo artist,'" Harrison says with a laugh. "But fuck you, it's me."

That should be the sophomore album's title.