Jason Myles Goss sings his songs like someone is trying to take them away from him. Moving between love ballads, dashboard elegies, and wild-eyed pub waltzes, his writing evokes the grace and economy of David Gray and his voice reverberates with the earnest intensity of Ray Lamontagne, moving tastefully between the plaintive and the bold, the sweet and the soulful, the ragged testimonial and the bittersweet lullaby. Plain and simply— Jason is a stand-out. In a sea of guitar strumming twenty-somethings singing about lost girlfriends and late nights, Jason’s songs resonate at a much deeper level, with lyrics more acutely poetic and stories that pull at something underneath the surface.

History

I was born and raised in a small factory town called Hopedale, MA – a great place to grow up. The town was centered around an abandoned textile mill, a corporation that built the community from the ground up in the early 20th century and then closed its doors in the late-seventies, leaving a skeleton of oil-soaked warehouses, machinery, and decaying railway lines. It was a small and scenic place, with remnants of an industry long-departed crudely etched into the landscape like jailhouse tattoos. There were summer concerts at the park bandstand every Wednesay and the local barbershop would sponsor the little league team every season-- even the field itself was built on the old factory landfill. The mill itself was huge; as a kid I could never get over all of the bricks--a million square feet of abandoned brick wall. Some of my very first songs were about these bricks.

As a teenager I began recording at a small studio not far from the flea markets my dad and I would drive to on Sundays, where I first learned about Dylan’s voice and about the smell of Garcia Vegas. In May of 2003 I pressed up 1000 copies of my first full-length album called Long Way Down. This album deals with those things experienced by most college kids: first loves, late nights, and the countless victories and defeats found in between. By all self-released standards Long Way Down was a success. The album gained local attention and sold quickly. I began to perform in new places with more and more people attending the shows. To date, Long Way Down has sold two thousand copies all across the country and continues to sell.

In the summer of 2003 I was chosen as one of five finalists in the Newport Folk Festival Songwriters’ Contest-- I was the youngest finalist by over 10 years. In the Fall I traveled to Ireland for a month, performing on the street, playing in pubs, and working on material for a follow-up album. When I returned home I rented an apartment outside of Boston and immersed myself in the music scene, religiously attending the open mike at the legendary Club Passim in Cambridge, and trying to absorb and learn all what I could. I began listening to many new artists who became heroes to me: Gillian Welch, Martin Sexton, Josh Ritter, Elliott Smith, and David Gray. I could feel their influences on my own writing and, as new songs materialized, I became more and more excited with the sound of them.

Over the next two years I began performing throughout the Northeast at premier venues like: Club Passim, The Stone Church, The Paradise Lounge, The Nameless Coffeehouse, Acoustic Coffee, The Living Room, The Bitter End, World Café Live and the Tin Angel; opening sold-out shows for artists such as: Ellis Paul, Peter Mulvey, Lori Mckenna, Jess Klein, Martha Wainwright, and Vance Gilbert.

In the spring of 2005 I released my second album entitled Another Ghost to a sold-out crowd at Club Passim in Cambridge, MA. Heavily influenced by late-night highway drives and AM radio listening, this album deals with holding on to those things that are most important, memories that we relive time and time again, which revisit us like ghosts. I am very proud of this album, it contains many types of songs-- some that felt like drilling through rock to find, others that were caught in a drainpipe somewhere in my head and fell in my lap while I was sleeping. Critics describe the music as “dark and disarmingly sweet,” sung in a voice “as raw as whiskey and soothing as honey.” I was called “a diamond in the rough” by Boston’s Insite Magazine and was dubbed “one of the brightest on the folk circuit today” by the esteemed Stone Church in Newmarket, NH. As the calendar rolled into 2006, I was selected by the Metrowest Daily News as one of the ten artists to watch.

See you at your local watering hole :)

Jason