
Album photo by Micah Nickens, portrait by TahJah Harmony.
Jeffrey Roedel's new album, Waves, came out in December 2024.
In December, Baton Rouge multi-disciplinary artist Jeffrey Roedel released his latest album of spoken word poetry—Waves. The project is the artist's fifth full-length collection since he started publishing poetry during the pandemic—seeing the artform as an opportunity to collaborate with local musical talent. For Waves, he brought on board the Givers' Josh LeBlanc, Royal Teeth's Gary Larsen, Seth Kauffman (guitarist for Lana del Rey and Jim James), and a host of others to contribute to this atmospheric study on heartbreak, its ebbing and its flowing. For this year's Music issue, we sat down with Roedel to learn more about the album's backstory.
Tell me about how you approached this new album. How is Waves a continuation of your existing work? How is it different?
I really feel that this album approached me. But I didn’t work on it like a poet. I don’t think I am a poet. I’m a journalist. I report on me, and how I’m feeling about what I see and experience. So, Waves became a little more personal than the last album. It started as an idea for a smaller project, an EP actually, and that’s something I’ll revisit later in 2025, but the pieces “Kiss Me Like You Talk to God” and “Leaf in the Water” were at the heart of it, and so was “Sudden Moves”, a poem I wrote specifically to perform live with Norbert Redmond on guitar at an arts event held by You Aren’t Alone, a mental health-focused nonprofit. I didn’t end up reading that one for various reasons, but kept it in mind to record. Eventually some deeper themes emerged.
"I don’t think I am a poet. I’m a journalist. I report on me, and how I’m feeling about what I see and experience." —Jeffrey Roedel
I had released a very maximalist high-concept album called OMNI in 2023, and that was maybe misunderstood by many, so I wanted to make a smaller, more direct and raw collection in the summer of 2024. But when I really dug into a lot of ideas around resilience, stillness, spiritual purpose and waves, I realized this had to be a full album. But throughout, the line from “Sudden Moves” remained a core theme: “Baby, I’m the best of the best when I’m breaking.” That’s a wave. We appreciate them most when the surf explodes and the water screams and crashes into the sand. But maybe that’s people, too. The “baby” in question is me. This is positive self-talk. I thought, maybe I’m at my best when I’m breaking. Because that’s when I’m most in tune with my feelings and learning and growing through something difficult. That’s the hope. And hope is beautiful, too.
This project involved a lot of collaboration. What is that process like? How do you go about working with other creatives to create the soundscapes for your poetry?
I like to think of it as a cinematic process. A composer scoring a film scene will watch the scene and listen to the dialog over and over before he starts to write the music. Making these poetry soundscapes is similar to that.
The music tracks can start with a simple mood, a discussion about the feel of the poem, or something as specific as a riff on guitar or keys that fits well. But it all begins with the words, or the rhythm of the demo vocal track I make and how my friends and I feel when listening to the bare poem itself. Having done this for almost five years, I’ve learned to keep the recording process fluid and open to spontaneity, and also to allow my friends to respond to my words in authentic ways rather than forcing something incredibly pre-planned, because they are all really good at what they do. Being part of something bigger than myself is more rewarding to me than seeing my words alone on a page.
[Read this next: The Lifelines Poetry Project]
The process depends on which producer I am working with or if I’m producing or mixing something myself. Everyone works differently. Some tracks are built up from short demos, almost like a hip-hop track would be, and re-arranged into what we think is an engaging soundscape that serves the poem. And a lot of what is done is recorded or mixed live together, track by track, with Gary Larsen (of Royal Teeth) who has endless little demos and instrumental ideas laying around. He and I like to get into a flow in his studio out in Ponchatoula. And I sometimes bring in Emily Smith (of Dellamemoria) or other vocalists to add a dream-like quality to the tracks with their singing. I love turning Emily’s vocals up and mine down! Josh LeBlanc (of GIVERS) and Cohen Hartman (Spiralcaster) are producers that like to work alone more, they are mad scientists in their home studios, so their tracks usually begin with discussions about the piece, and a lot more specific music talk about mixing effects, tempo, arrangement ideas and song references as spirit guides for the track. Then they work on it and send over a demo or draft, and we go back and forth like that until it feels right.
As for the poetry itself—what are the stories, themes, language that inspire these works in Waves from a lyric standpoint?
A lot of these words grew out of a heartbreaking situation for sure. I think most of us have been through that—whether it’s a gift from someone else, or we’ve broken our own hearts. Several of these are my attempts to grapple with being suddenly shoved into that state, to think through what happened and what’s next. “I’m cut and I’m pasted, in a lemon state. Collaged and raw and jinxed in place.”
[Read this next: Where the Words Are]
Two years ago, I was obsessed with writing one poem that I thought Leonard Cohen could have written—and then discarded for something better he came up with—and I feel like I did that in 2023 with “As Many as the Stars.” So, I faced a real dilemma after that, because I truly didn’t feel like I had much to say that would sound better, so why try?
"A lot of these words grew out of a heartbreaking situation for sure. I think most of us have been through that—whether it’s a gift from someone else, or we’ve broken our own hearts."
—Jeffrey Roedel
But water arrived as a theme one day, and it just felt right to explore that with Waves, and I knew it would be therapeutic. Even if I was the only person who read them, I needed to write these poems in a desperate way. So that was enough of an impulse to begin again. “Some days are lost letters, confusing, but water, it never stops moving.”
The photography of my friend Micah Nickens, whose striking image is the album cover, was a major influence on this album. I became obsessed with that photo, and it churned up a lot of emotion and many ideas. And another inspiration was the Hokusai painting “The Great Wave Off Kanagawa”. I stared at that Japanese art for days, and it really helped me to write “Ukiyo,” probably my favorite poem here. That towering wave is massive, imposing, and the fishermen are so very vulnerable and small. That’s how life makes us feel sometimes. But, see, the fisherman are not focused on the danger, they are locked in, controlling what they can control. They look helpless from afar, but they’ll survive. Focusing on our purpose helps us through the waves.