The Jones Title Make a Statement with Their New Single “Birkenhead” [Premiere]

With so much time spent off the road over the last one and a half years, with nothing to do but write and record, it seemed like the right time for The Jones Title to get ambitious, and get ambitious they did. The New York City rockers, featuring percussionist Justin Gray, bassist Roger Mulligan, guitarist Joey Vaughan, and singer Brian Detlefs, are revving up the proverbial engines, getting started on the most highly motivated chapter of their existence with the release of their new single “Birkenhead.”

This track is your first shot of new music from the band that comes as part of a wave of four EPs already written, recorded, and ready for release over the coming months. “Birkenhead” will serve as the title track of the first of these EPs, ready to drop before the end of the year. It’s an obvious choice for a first single, the type of song that sets your expectations and gets you excited for what’s to come once the record is released.

Explaining how the song came to be, the band stated,

“The titular song for the EP developed really organically, as a statement not just for the EP but the whole recording project. We began recording these songs nearly a year ago, at a time when everyone’s place in the world felt especially precarious. We were all dealing with a lot of change, both in our personal lives and in our relationship as a band. So when we stumbled onto the term ‘Birkenhead Drill,’ we all sort of latched onto this sense of purpose that it invoked in us.

“The song itself came into being during a warm-up for a rehearsal. Roger happened to find this vaguely Radiohead-esque bass line that felt like a response to ‘National Anthem.’ Justin fell into this really tight 6/8 pocket, and got intensely focused on the placement and tone of his cymbals. Brian began building in a beautiful, finger-picking layer, while Joey explored this gorgeous E Bow tone that so perfectly captured this inescapable sense of anxiety. We all sat on it for a long time, building this slow and dramatic intro until, like an instinct, we all just sort of fell into the song together. Even the lyrics just sort of came organically, Brian started quietly repeating this refrain of ‘women and children first,’ over the whole thing. There was this incredible sense of release that it brought, like a tidal wave sort of washing everything clean. Violent but cathartic.”

What differentiates The Jones Title from the rest of the pack is without a doubt their tenacity and their self-confidence. Releasing four EPs that feed into each other is no easy task, but this isn’t a group content with the status quo.

The band came together quite organically, with Gray reaching out to his former bandmate Detlefs to see if he wanted to jam in some rehearsal facilities that Gray had recently received access to as part of his role as a teaching artist for Carnegie Hall’s education program. At that time, Detlefs had been already conversing with Mulligan about playing together, and Vaughan, a longtime friend of Mulligan’s, was looking for a new musical venture. They quickly hit it off and The Jones Title was born.

With a lot of new music on the way, the band is thinking big, ready to make up for lost time with thrilled to be expanding their horizons.

Artwork for the album ‘Birkenhead’ by The Jones Title