B-Side Guys

When artists translate personal geography into sound, they often slip into regional clichés or nostalgic sentimentality. Nashville-based songwriter Jess Kerber avoids these pitfalls on “Never Again,” instead crafting a sonic cartography that maps emotional terrain with remarkable precision.

As the opening statement from her debut album ‘From Way Down Here,’ the track establishes themes of loss, cosmic scale, and home that permeate the collection. What distinguishes Kerber’s approach is how she transforms abstract concepts into tangible sensory experiences. The mid-tempo waltz creates the physical sensation of motion—specifically “the cocooned feeling of a starlit drive through the countryside”—while her breathy tenor delivery hovers intimately close, as if whispering directly into the listener’s ear.

This immediacy gains additional resonance through production choices that balance restraint with revelation. Ambient guitar harmonies and weeping pedal steel emerge gradually beneath her placid strumming, creating dimensional depth that mirrors the song’s lyrical exploration of space and distance. When she sings “The kind of place / That’d you feel safe / I miss it sometimes / But never for long / I’ll know it forever / But never again,” Kerber captures the paradox of places that permanently shape us despite their temporary nature in our lives.

Her technical approach reflects a creative trajectory that began at age 12 when she first picked up guitar. Experimental tunings and picking styles influenced by Joni Mitchell and Susan Tedeschi have evolved into a sophisticated musical vocabulary that transcends simple genre classification. Though marketed within Americana-folk parameters, Kerber’s compositions reveal the dual influence of her Louisiana upbringing and formal education at Boston’s Berklee College of Music.

Collaborator Will Orchard deserves credit for helping expand Kerber’s arrangements while preserving their essential character. Their partnership—which developed organically through Boston-area performances—echoes the dynamic between Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, where production serves songcraft rather than overshadowing it.

What ultimately makes “Never Again” so affecting is its delicate balance between universal emotion and specific detail. Kerber transmutes what she calls the “way apart from the rest of the world feeling” of the Deep South into something simultaneously intimate and expansive. The song becomes a vessel that can hold seemingly contradictory experiences: knowing something forever while acknowledging its permanent absence, feeling both deeply rooted and perpetually adrift. Through this paradox, Kerber establishes herself not merely as a promising newcomer but as a fully-formed cartographer of memory’s complicated terrain.