Receiving Transmission: Messersmith Serenades HPR

Minneapolis singer/songwriter Jeremy Messersmith is rapidly gaining acclaim throughout the Midwest and beyond. His voice is forlorn and intense, and his songs’ thick chords and beat structure make the whole listening experience erupt in jubilation.

After only four years of performing, he has won the hearts of critics and music fans alike. He even managed to pique the interest of Grammy Award winner, Dan Wilson (Trip Shakespeare, Semisonic), who produced his latest album, “Silver City.”

Messersmith’s music speaks truths about the human condition with an uplifting and benevolent demeanor. At the same time, a voice hasn’t sounded so distant and forlorn since Elliot Smith.

One speculation as to why the two singers sound so similar in timbre is that they both used double voice recordings, meaning that they both recorded the same vocal line twice and had them directly overlapping one another. Messersmith said he likes the effect it creates because of its “beefier” sound.

He grew up in Richland, Wash., homeschooled in a fairly religious community. “I grew up in a town of about 100,000 people,” he said, “but we lived in sort of the outskirts. I guess you could call it a hobby farm. Church was kind of a really big part of growing up.

“Probably my earliest influence was playing in church,” he continued. “I played trumpet in the church band. You could probably classify it as a ‘holy-roller’ variety of church. That was kind of a big part of it. I guess it sounded a little like Dixieland…”

He explained further that he was not allowed to listen to non-secular music growing up. When he did listen to the radio, it was mostly 60s and 70s oldies stations. He said, “I ended up being influenced a lot by people like Brian Wilson, the Beatles, and I think my favorite music of all time was basically anything from old Motown. That doesn’t really sound much like my stuff at all, but I just love it when I hear it.”

Although Motown is not the prevailing sound in his music, his harmonies are distinctly reminiscent of the Beatles, and of the Beach Boys as well. Emotion flows from his songs, and the thickness of their sound goes down smooth.

His music and his life make for an interesting duality. In life he is reserved, almost shy, but in his music nothing is held back. He refers to his style as “confessional music,” an appropriate term for the contrast between his life and song.
“You gotta remember I was getting raised homeschooled, so I think I have a bit of an anti-social streak. I just prefer hanging out by myself most of the time,” he said.

Being such a reserved individual makes performing somewhat difficult for Messersmith to this day. “It occasionally still is [awkward] if I have reason to be nervous,” he said, “and I can pretty much come up with any reason off the top of my head. Stage fright was always kind of a problem, although it’s kind of diminished over the years. I think the more you do it the easier it gets.”

His new album, “Silver City,” serves as a tribute to his love for Minneapolis. Songs like “Light Rail,” “The Commuter,” and, “Welcome to Suburbia” depict the life of an average guy and his love for the big city.

“I think Minneapolis and St. Paul are great towns,” he said. “I think of them as the Paris of the Midwest.”

Computers are another love of Messersmith’s. “I work at a tech support company, so I guess I’m just your average computer nerd,” he said. It goes without saying that he is also an avid video-gamer. Lately he has been hitting GTA4 pretty hard, but said that he’s having a bit of a hard time with it, because he drives slowly and avoids car accidents.

His love for gaming even found its way into his new album. He said, “On the record I played a DS game on one of the tracks. It’s called Electroplankton. It’s a music creation game for the Nintendo DS. I actually incorporated a bunch of that stuff into the first and last track of the album.”

He even attributes his definition of music to computer nerdery. “Music is simply the audible encoding of information, or the tonal encoding of information. That’s sort of my computer nerd definition of what it could be, but when you look at music, or you look even at language, all words are condensed and encoded information.

“I think music is just another way of encoding it, like adding a splash of color to a black and white movie.”