A Man of His Words: Jeremy Quentin
Small Houses
Words by Janine Stankus Photos by Eric Morales
The contemporary folk genre is crawling with tropes: “Mountains, California, rivers…” muses Jeremy Quentin, explaining that musicians are no longer turning on the radio. For Jeremy, these are the marks of musical phoniness which he does not abide.
“I remember the very first song I wrote when I was 13. The first line was ‘I was walking downtown.’ It was bullshit, ‘cause I had never been downtown anywhere. You know, it was dishonest.”
The Flint, Michigan, native has seen his share of downtowns, since having lived in several states and toured the world as Small Houses, a solo, yet collaborative, project he started at 17. Jeremy’s early musical influences are a mélange of his mother’s folk favorites like Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Jackson Browne and his brother’s punk and ska idols: Rancid, Operation Ivy, Less than Jake.
Small Houses’ sound, however, is firmly grounded in folk, with slow, lilting melodies and gravelly vocals breaking over clear, ebbing guitar chords. His grittier sensibilities manifest in a penchant for “using bright tones, and sometimes a bright voice, to say often vulnerable, hateful, and just really sad things.”
There’s a serious beauty to the songs, which reflects their creator’s almost academic approach. Jeremy pens 4-5 pages every night and studies the artists whom he admires for inspiration. He thinks that Elliot Smith is the greatest songwriter of all time, and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy is better than Paul Simon—but is up for a debate on either.
“I don’t think I’m good enough to have done anything that someone else hasn’t done,” he admits. “The thing I think I’m really good at right now is finding good qualities in all music and trying to take that into my own writing.”
Aside from culling the gems of genius, what keeps Small Houses from falling into folk’s typical trappings is Jeremy’s focus on lyricism. There are only “a few dozen” musicians whose words he considers on par with what could be thought of as “scholarly” writing, and those are his favorites. He believes musicians have an opportunity to use language in a really artful way to describe their own lives.
Take Bob Dylan who won a Nobel Prize in Literature for “creating new poetic expression” in his tradition. He often spoke about the interrelatedness of lyrics and music. To quote the bard: “It’s not just pretty words to a tune or putting tune to words; there’s nothing that’s exploited.” Jeremy’s own philosophy jives. He balks at the suggestion that it’s not a musician’s job to be a poet. “That’s nonsense! Being a musician is everything,” Jeremy says. “And that’s why so many of us suck at it: because you [have to be] Renaissance.”
For all his seriousness about music, Jeremy also revels in the silly and the eccentric. He sets his songs to videos of himself building aquariums out of television sets, constructing greenhouses in his apartment, and inciting a dialogue about MAGA hats vs. Kid Rock after a run. Throughout the pandemic, he’s also been writing and releasing new album material as a series of bedroom demos, simply because he wanted to shake up his process. In terms of his aspirations for Small Houses, they’re modest-to-none. “We’re just doing this for the art,” he asserts. “Anything outside of that is sort of a distraction.” He does hope that a select group of friends approves his new work, that his mom comes around to it, and that more people discover his quirky Instagram.
Re-thinking
Jeremy has a unique take on the music industry’s forced break. “I think we were all taking music and shows too lightly,” he says, citing mismatched bills, underpaid artists, and lack of mutual support as signs of musicians becoming disenfranchised. “I think we need to step back and rethink the whole thing,” he posits. “Because it gets [mundane] playing in town 25 times a year. I say we should play, step back, write a new set, then five months later, play.”
