Jerry Paper

Jerry Paper doesn’t take themselves too seriously…and neither should you! Free Time is their new album out April 15 on Stones Throw.  

Every morning Lucas Nathan wakes up, slips into a flowy dress, makes a plate of scrambled eggs, and heads to the studio for a day of absolute jamming as their freaky weirdo musical persona: Jerry Paper. The one rule? NO SELF DOUBT! What came of that creative process is the synth-pop, weird-rock, bizarro-muzak masterpiece: Free Time, an expression of freedom on their journey to self-discovery as a nonbinary artist, groover, and, most importantly, shaker of ass.

When Jerry Paper asks you to hit *PLAY* on Free Time, they mean it in the most literal sense of the word…they want you to PLAY around and have some friggin’ fun for once!

As Nathan croons in ‘Just Say Play’, “It’s your life, baby, so choose whatever you want!” We can all free ourselves from the rigid demands of the B-B-B-BORING binary system imposed on us by a B-B-B-BORING hetero-normative society. In ‘Myopitopia’, Nathan gazes out their kitchen window in Los Angeles at a dystopic tableau of dented microwaves and industrial decay—the rewards of a world run by technocrats—and asks, is playing by the rules of this game worth it, if all it gets us is a pile of rotten stinky trash and crap?

The album art for Free Time shows Nathan going nutso with a chainsaw, threatening to destroy an enormous, imposing hourglass in order to literally FREE themselves from the constraints of TIME as it functions in capitalism—to free themselves from the brutal demands to: Produce More Crap! Get back to work! Stop having fun! Finish the album already! And be normal!

With Free Time, Jerry Paper gives us an alternative to this doomed wasteland. They invite us to climb aboard their funhouse version of the Starship Enterprise, one whose Prime Directive is self-acceptance— learning to rid ourselves of judgment from without and within, to forgive ourselves for our mistakes, and to boldly go into the Deep Space of our own inner worlds, where our inner wellspring of creativity lies. At the end of the album, with ‘Flower, A Square’, Nathan lands their spacecraft and disembarks with a message, singing, “I come in peace, I’ve tried to mold myself to a world that won’t see me.” Nathan *comes out* (literally and figuratively) from the vessel embracing themselves for who they really are: non-binary, a beautiful flower, nuanced, strange, bizarre, and flawed…with a ketchup stain on their blue dress.

Full of earworms that wriggle around laying colorful eggs in your brain, and funky easy-listening jams that sound like they’re played on a Bop It toy from outer space, Free Time, will get you smilin’ and groovin’. Life got you down? Well Jerry Paper’s got the simple prescription for you! Just a daily dosage of Free (play)Time and a simple serving of (1) one shake of the ass!