Jerry Joseph, we are happy to tell you, returns – not that he’s been away exactly, but we have an insatiable appetite for the kind of music that Jerry Joseph makes, and so the news that there’s a new album, Panther Tracks Vol. 2, is due out July 31, 2026, is a thing to celebrate. Now, Panther Tracks Vol. 1 was released in September 2025, and so the other news, that this will be a four-volume series, perhaps hints at a Vol. 3 maybe around the turn of the year. You see how greedy we are? We make no apologies for this.
We also make no apologies for sharing in full with you what Jerry Joseph has said about the song and the album in full. If you’ve seen Jerry Joseph live, and, err, if not, why not?! Then you’ll know that the between-song speech is rather more than the usual stage banter and can be as heartfelt or passionate as the singing. So, take it away, Jerry:
“I’m losing my sense of time… pre-pandemic into pandemic, into immediate post-pandemic. It’s getting blurry…A few years back, I was at an Airbnb in Charleston, waiting for my long, long-time crew/protector/friend, Young Jim, to bring over my bags and acoustic guitar. (I must have flown in.) He kept texting, “I think I’m here,” for probably two hours before he finally arrived. I thought it was a good title for his new record and wrote it down in “cool song title notes.” He declined the suggestion.
Sometime later, the Jackmormons had been invited to perform at a good friend’s wedding in Playa Cerritos, a bit south of Todos Santos. A massive affair, in a made-to-look-old-but-actually-
It was a two-night run of shows for the wedding, me making some questionable sobriety decisions. I had a new pedal (I am not a pedal guy) called the Bicycle, with a mind of its own. Stevie, my bass player, decided to drop acid and, halfway through the first set, came literally begging me to turn it off, as it was speaking to him personally… not necessarily good things. Regardless, my recollection is we were smoking as a band — at least the Mexicans thought so. Half of them probably “assigned” by my little brother to keep an eye on us, for safety’s sake. Memories and grudges can last a long fucking time in Mexico, and I wasn’t always the Peace and Love Jerry you’ve come to know 🙂
After playing the endless sets of bands fueled beyond Red Bull, we headed back to our various pads. Dex and I were sharing a condo on Los Cerritos Beach, and — trust me here — weirdly, I started writing “I Think I’m Here.” Then, and still now, I get these crushing feelings of a lost past, or the wrong choices, or how I’ve become numb to the excitement of music, early stages of romance, the idea that it’s been too much life. No one is going to know, remember, much less believe all the shit that makes up my story.
Even as I type this, alone in a Madrid restaurant having the ox-tail foie gras egg thing… who knows? Who cares? I have this fucking 5,000-hour movie in my head, and nobody’s going to buy a ticket. Most of all, I was thinking of my wife — that despite the warnings, she believed in me enough to say yes. I know how much I’ve disappointed her, and all the other safer, steadier (clearly more handsome) choices she could have made. And yet, our meeting and getting to know each other were wildly romantic, and also full of stories that, if anyone writes them down, will become mythological as opposed to factual. (Though in my life, those are usually the same thing.)
Sometimes I forget how to get back. Where’s the fucking trail? Where’s the raw magic of love and facing the unknown together? Then every once in a while, with the sound of big-ass Baja waves crashing and the flicker of a St. Frances candle, the path lights up…I think I’m here.”
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