ALBUM REVIEW: On ‘Blue Sky Sundays’, JD Clayton Shows Us the Way Back Home
Alli Patton
Posted On February 28, 2025
You can’t go home again. Or, at least, that’s what they say.
That’s because home is never really how you remember it, as if someone came in while you were away and moved your trusted memories a half-inch. There’s something different about it all, about the roads you used to drive all night toward the temples of your youth. Each stoplight along the way blinks back like strangers in the dark, the fissures in the asphalt now reading a foreign scrawl. It’s not home, however, that undergoes such an evolution. It’s often us who come back the outsiders, forever changed.
When JD Clayton left Nashville – having gone, as so many do, in pursuit of his dreams – he was headed toward his native Fort Smith, Arkansas, a place that raised him, informed his early love of music, and was calling him back now. What he encountered upon return may have been that curious landscape of used-to-bes, but what he really discovered there was calm, clarity, and, in turn, Blue Sky Sundays.
His sophomore release, and the follow-up to his acclaimed 2023 debut, Long Way From Home, Blue Sky Sundays holds a certain weightlessness. From its blossoming folk-rock opener, “Let You Down,” to its closing moonlit waltz, “Goodnight,” the collection is unhurried, marked with languid grooves and breezy flourishes, and also carefree. Its nine tracks act as exercises in peace, contentment, and what must be surrendered to find both.
Sure, songs like the rambling “Arkansas Kid,” awash in the drunken eloquence of barroom strings, and the prowling cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Give Me One Reason,” full-bodied and brilliant, effortlessly showcase the electrifying musicianship that has become Clayton’s hallmark. It’s what’s born in the lulls, though, that make Blue Sky Sundays a triumph.
It’s hush-a-bye tunes like the effervescent “Slow & Steady,” with its joyful la da di da’s and sunshiny proverbs, and the untethered “High Hopes & Low Expectations,” rich with hard-won wisdom, that make the album truly shine.
Throughout Blue Sky Sundays, JD Clayton walks with us a ways, pointing out the simple joys of unextraordinary days, reminding us that success and prosperity are all relative, and showing us there is a way back home. Wherever that may be.
JD Clayton’s Blue Sky Sundays is out Feb. 28 via Rounder Records.
