Review: Juni Ata Genre Hops But Retains His Emotional Weight on Debut 'Saudade'

The COVID-19 pandemic has been hard on everyone, but especially on musicians, who have found their primary revenue stream disappear with no notice. But it's been just has hard on tour managers, who have no tours to manage. That's the reality faced by Jesse Daniel Edwards, who has worked as tour manager for Morrissey and Lucinda Williams since 2017, after several attempts to break out as a musician, even capturing the attention and mentorship of John Prine's tour manager Al Bunetta. The result of that forced seclusion was the ultimate making of lemonade from some pretty sour lemons, Saudade, which releases August 21.

Most of the songs on Saudade, a Portuguese word roughly translating to “nostalgic or melancholic longing”, were actually recorded long before the pandemic, in 2018 when a friend coaxed him into the studio to exorcise the musical ghosts resulting from a failed romance and the death of his mother in 2017. But, even though the recording sessions featured production from legendary Stax house band guitarist and Blues Brother Steve Cropper, Edwards went back to his regular work and let the songs lie.

During the COVID-19 lockdown, Edwards found himself with a surplus of time and a tape full of songs needing a home. The songs of longing, heartbreak, and loss, but with an undercurrent of hopefulness, seemed like a perfect soundtrack to the current times, so Edwards adopted the moniker Juni Ata and began working on releasing Saudade into the world.

It's a hard album to pen down, musically. There is the gentle piano ballad “Hard Letting You Down Easy”, which would play well on any adult contemporary radio station. There's the Americana earnestness of “Fight Hard, Run Fast.” There are shades of his old client Morrissey's melancholy on “All My Tomorrows Are Mondays.” And there's the power pop jangle of “When It Rains in LA.”

Another song following the power pop mold is album highlight “I Will Try Anything Twice.” There are smart, instantly quotable lyrics scattered throughout Saudade, but the best ones seem to have concentrated themselves on this song, a man's bemused ruminations on how his bad luck might be from a life filled with bad decisions. “You'd think I would have learned by now,” he croons, “that playing with matches is fun until you burn your house down. And wouldn't it be nice if I wasn't so bad at taking good advice?”

There isn't likely to be much that anyone is going to take out of 2020 that's positive, but Saudade is an album that needed to see the light of day, especially in some particularly dark ones, and Juni Ata is an artist who belongs out on a stage when the touring world resumes again.