Jörn Schlüter has been recording his songs for his band Someday Jacob for twelve years. Fifty-five songs, four albums, one EP. He will continue to do so; a new album by the Bremen/Hamburg Americana band is in the works. But something else is happening first – Jörn has made a solo album. It’s called “The Other Mile”. The songs on it appeared within a short time in the summer of 2024. “Normally I first have one song and all the other songs sort of flow out of that one,” says Jörn "but these songs came close together. They hung together like a flock of chickens that someone forgot in the fields. They needed a home.”

The songs on “The Other Mile” were written during a moment of crisis that brought Jörn's life to a virtual standstill. Jörn spent a lot of time with an old acquaintance – anxiety. “She's a good friend, but sometimes she stays too long,” he says, "like the last guest at a party who doesn't understand that the hosts want to go to bed. It took a while this time to make that clear to her." Such challenging times are part of Jörn’s biography. He is familiar with them and wants to see them as an invitation to integrate what has not yet been integrated. That's how you can grow. Not so much to become better, faster, fitter and more productive but to get closer to yourself.

In the fall of 2024, Joern called two friends to record his new songs with. Matthias Meusel, who is best known for being Roger Cicero's drummer for 20 years. Stephan Gade, who has always played with Niels Frevert and sometimes with Udo Lindenberg. During the time in a clinic, Jörn listened to Neil Young's “Comes A Time” over and over again while doing his daily bike ergometer workout. He realized that he wanted similarly reduced arrangements for the new songs. Drums, bass, acoustic guitars. “I felt something gentle, but also something rooted,” describes Jörn, "in my head it was always Matthias and Stephan playing these songs.” A fourth musician is significantly involved in the sound of “The Other Mile” – Eric Heywood. The US-American played/plays the pedal steel guitar for Son Volt, Jayhawks, Joe Henry and Tift Merritt, among others. He is currently part of the Pretenders' live band, among others. His dark, gleaming sound illuminates the depth of the songs on “The Other Mile” and adds Americana warmth.

One song on the record is called “Used To Love To Dance”. Jörn sings about how he stopped to dance years ago out of a feeling of shame. It’s been a strain on his marriage because his wife would have liked to dance at wedding receptions. About two years ago, Joern finally started to dance again with the help of his wife. At first, they danced in the in the living room, Jörn feeling shy and clumsy. But now he’s out there on Bremen's dance floors. The song is about Adam and Eve, about shame and the body and how all of this is perhaps connected to the well-being of the soul. The song itself is a dance and is set to a bolero rhythm, the chords have a Tex-Mex flair. Maybe it will remind you of Calexico, maybe not.

One of the songs is called “Dissociate”. It’s a melancholic and somewhat archaic Americana song that Jason Molina might also have liked. Jörn sings about dissociation and the feeling of perceiving the surrounding world as unreal. This is probably down to an overwhelmed nervous system. The brain withdraws from a situation because a danger seems too great to confront directly. The information cannot be properly processed and flies around in the hippocampus in disorder – a simple trigger is enough to make the brain think the danger is real again.

The album was mixed by Grammy®-winner and Wilco producer Tom Schick at Wilco's studio The Loft in Chicago. Schick has also produced for Glen Hansard and Norah Jones. "I love how different the records he's involved with sound. He didn't fundamentally change the recordings from Studio North – he just made everything better." This is followed by a passionate monologue about old Neve consoles and even older microphones standing in front of lovingly restored guitar amplifiers from the 1960s. For Jörn, music is haptic, physical, it has colours and aromas.

Stephen Marsh, who recently mastered Jeff Tweedy's solo album, has also mastered a lot of film music, for example that of “Ted Lasso”. "Sound is super important to me – I go a long way for it. I think it's so great when a song becomes tangible, when I can let myself fall into it.”

The recordings took place in Bremen's legendary Studio-Nord, a very old recording studio with a legendary live room. The records by Dutch classic acts Heintje and Rudi Carrell were made here, and later those by Die Sternen, Niels Frevert, Stoppok, Die Nerven, Muff Potter and so on. Jörn lives on the other side of the street, which is a plus.