Damien Jurado has never pretended to be the guy with the five-year plan, but even he didn’t expect to wake up one morning and realize he’d written himself into a trilogy. “I think you asked me last time if there’d be another chapter,” he says, half-laughing, half-remembering. “I’m pretty sure I said no. Everything comes in threes, right? That wasn’t my plan.” And yet here we are: the third act of whatever cosmic, spiritual, emotional odyssey he’s been channeling since that now-mythologized dream a decade ago.
The timing is funny because nothing about Jurado’s real life feels especially cinematic. Mundane, maybe. Chaotic, definitely. He’s staring down a massive tour that sends him through Europe, across America, then back to Europe before dumping him into Asia and Australia. It’s the kind of itinerary that would exhaust a small army. “Am I mentally prepared? God no,” he says. “I don’t know how I’m going to do it.” The first legs will be full-band, the later ones… well, maybe. “I change my mind often,” he adds.
And then there’s the perpetual band/no-band saga, a subplot that’s almost as long-running as his discography. “There was a time when I really thought, okay, no more bands. My audience doesn’t want bands,” he says. He tried bringing one back for the Maricopa tour, only to discover that fans—those same fans requesting it—didn’t actually want it. “It wasn’t received that well,” he shrugs. “Which is weird because I don’t make acoustic records. Never have.”
It wasn’t just taste—it was economics. Flying ten people across continents is one thing; flying ten people and a choir is another. The “choir,” he clarifies, is really three or four female vocalists, a condensed version of his more ambitious arrangements. “I do want to do a full choir one day,” he says, “but without a band. Like Sisters—just tour that.”
Cue the inevitable Polyphonic Spree comparison. Jurado laughs when I ask whether he’d lean into costumes. “We did the robe thing for the last record release—silver robes. But I don’t know. I love kitsch, man. I love it. But in the psych-folk world, costumes have kind of been done. Sufjan did it. Danielson did it. Polyphonic did it. If I did it again, maybe it’d just be matching colors. I don’t know if I’m that far.”
The bigger shift is thematic. The new record sits squarely inside the universe he’s been building since Maraqopa—a place where abandoned Earths, celestial messengers, lovers stranded in cosmic ghost towns, and Rod Serling-level existentialism tangle together. “As soon as I wrote the first song I knew it wasn’t done,” he says. “The story kept going.”
Serling is a major influence. Jurado recently dove into Night Gallery, the writer’s 70s follow-up to Twilight Zone. “It’s so blatantly 70s,” he says, grinning. “But if you can get past that, the writing’s unbelievable.” He talks about smart sci-fi being “dumbed down” by blockbuster spectacle—“alligator versus shark”—and how he gravitates toward the more philosophical side: big questions disguised as eerie parables.
Which leads to the obvious question: how much of the trilogy’s main character resembles Jurado himself? His girlfriend believes the answer is: quite a lot. “I’m still not convinced,” he says. “But since having the dream and writing these records, it has consumed my life in a weird way. Like a sci-fi artist living inside whatever they created.”
There’s also the uncanny parallel between his character MH and Silver Catherine—a woman who chooses to remain on an abandoned Earth rather than ascend to the next plane—and the very real woman in Jurado’s life who arrived when he needed someone most. She’d been his friend for twenty years, through marriages, kids, collapse. Then came 2012: the dream, the spiritual high, and an emotional crash so severe he attempted suicide two weeks before his son was born.
“I thought I was crazy,” he says softly. “My family has a history of mental illness. Friends disappeared. Life got really bleak.” He credits his son—and guilt—with stopping him. But it was that same season his future partner reappeared. When he went on tour with Sharon Van Etten, he asked her to come just so he wouldn’t be alone. “Her only job was to keep me company,” he says. “We hadn’t spoken in six months.” She showed up anyway.
Another interviewer recently suggested she might be the real-world Silver Catherine. Jurado isn’t sure, but he admits the symmetry is eerie. “It could be,” he says. “Sometimes your life sneaks into the story even when you don’t mean for it to.”
As for the record’s larger theme—“disappearing from society to explore universal truths”—he laughs when I note how timely that sounds. “The world looks really messed up right now,” he agrees. “But it’s always been crazy. I think the album’s saying unplug yourself. Get out. There’s a line: out there is nowhere, and inside is endless. I try to live by that.”
Before we wrap, I ask about Tumbledown, the film he scored. He doesn’t sugarcoat it. “My experience was awful,” he says. “I’d probably never do a soundtrack again.” Too many investors, too many compromises, too much art being pushed around by people who don’t make it. “But I did it,” he says with a shrug. “And I’m glad you like it.”
As we sign off, I tell him I’m happy he’s alive—really alive—and not another Elliott Smith or Jason Molina tragedy. He nods. “I think about that a lot,” he says. “I wish those guys were still here, making records. I’m glad I’m still here. For my kids. And, you know… to keep doing this.”
Watch the interview above and then check out a 2014 interview between Damien and Kyle Meredith below.
