Graeme Jefferies Canary in a Coalmine LP

Canary in a Coalmine is Graeme's second official solo album. The album was written during the first New Zealand Covid-19 lockdown but has only just surfaced due to pressing plant delays. Unlike a lot of his previous releases (which were written and compiled over long periods of time), the songs on this album were more or less written at around the same time.

Albums written during lockdown tend to be special, and this one is no exception. It opens with "I Wish We Could Turn Back the Clock Like It's 1978," a chilling piano/vocal-only minor key ballad. This track pretty much sets the mood for the other nine songs on the album. It's not all bleak and woe-is-me-type stuff though. The next song, "I Want to Know What the West Wind Knows," was inspired by a discarded out-of-print biography on Emily Bronte purchased for a couple of dollars at the Wellington City Library. The book touches on her self-belief that her earthly joy would return to the elements at the point of physical departure.

Other tracks like "Where Did We All Go Wrong?" and "Where Can We Run to Now?" wrestle with the challenges presented by the isolation and uncertainty we all felt during this time. Graeme examines the limited choices we had left during the pandemic using a smidgen of black humor, along with a little bit of finger-pointing to create an engaging listen while still managing to bring some levity to this unprecedented time.

Graeme played all of the instruments on the record, and he recorded and mastered it himself. Like the first two This Kind of Punishment records, which were also made in semi-self-inflicted isolation, Canary in a Coalmine definitely benefits from a nose-to-the-grindstone, let's-do-it-now-or-never mindset that somehow sets those records and this one apart from their contemporaries.

Even the cover art was another happy accident, with Graeme finding and managing to move an intact skeleton of a bird that had been poisoned, which he found while working as a Compliance Officer. The back cover shows the 'Te Papa' Museum display that Graeme often visited of the skeleton of New Zealand's most famous racehorse Phar Lap who was mysteriously poisoned while racing in Mexico during the Great Depression.