Artist Jeremy Messersmith

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Jeremy Messersmith

Jeremy Messersmith burst onto the Twin Cities scene in 2006 with The Alcatraz Kid, a home-recorded batch of melodic melancholia that had critics falling over themselves to compare his folk-pop mini-symphonies to those of angel-voiced and emotionally troubled pop icons Brian Wilson and Elliott Smith. He avoided the sophomore slump on The Silver City (produced by Semisonic’s Dan Wilson) by updating his downhearted, sweetly sung tunes with bells and whistles both conventional (strings, brass) and quirky (omnichord, glockenspiel). That ability to walk the bittersweet line comes in handy on his latest LP, The Reluctant Graveyard, which is all about death—but not, you know, in a depressing way.

Updated 06/08/2011