Mt. Crushmore Records and Jared Hart are excited to announce the Friday, August 28th release of ‘The Midnight Motel’, the brand new solo album from the veteran New Jersey-based singer-songwriter. The follow-up to Hart’s 2015 debut solo full-length, ‘Past Lives & Pass Lines,’ ‘The Midnight Motel’ consists of ten songs that, even by Hart’s emotionally devastating standards, hit even harder than usual.
They’re songs that deserve to see the light of day because each one is a transcendent and resplendent tale of what it means to be human. There’s also a deep sense of yearning within its bones, of trying to hold on to what’s already gone while also searching for the answer as to why it’s no longer there.
Hart had the following to share about his new single ‘Bridges:’ “I grew up in a town where if you wanted to enter or leave, you had to cross a bridge two thirds of the time. I try not to take them for granted but I do think it led a lot of us to hone our skills at arson.”
Jared Hart has long been a well-respected and important name in the New Jersey alternative/punk scene. For over two decades, the Bayonne songwriter has been soundtracking the highs and lows of life through his various musical outlets, most recently with Mercy Union and as a solo artist. He also runs the influential Mt. Crushmore record label and has kept busy writing for Mercy Union or under his own name. Mercy Union’s stunning ‘White Tiger’ full-length was released in 2022, and in 2024, Hart issued a stirring, heartstring-tearing EP called ‘The Condor’, a tribute to an old friend who went by that nickname who sadly passed away. The line between Mercy Union’s music and Hart’s solo output was initially blurred, but over the past few years has become more distinct. As ‘The Condor’ demonstrated, the songs he records under his own name generally carry a heavier emotional weight for Hart because they’re more personal, more autobiographical, more vulnerable.
Produced by Hart and Rob Freeman, ‘The Midnight Motel’ was recorded at Audio Pilot Studios in New Jersey and features a number of Hart’s close friends and musical co-conspirators. Hart’s better half, Casey Macalush, sings backing vocals on ‘Ready To Go’, a track that also features Ben Nichols of Lucero and spoken word from poet Mischa Pearlman. Mercy Union’s Nick Jorgensen played bass on “three or four tracks” (Hart did so on the others), longtime co-conspirator Matt Olsson played drums, Mark Masefield played piano and organ on almost everything except what Hart calls “the really wonky piano” on the mournful swagger of final track ‘Downwhen’. Elsewhere, his friend Karen Levandoski sang on the vulnerable and wistful ‘Room Keys.’
It all combines to create a beautifully intangible temporary home, a place where clothes and hopes and dreams are scattered on the carpeted floor as headlights speed past on an unseen highway in the dark outside. Because ‘The Midnight Motel’ a place everybody’s been to, that everybody recognizes. Listen to the sweeping nostalgia, for instance, of ‘Tilted’, which feels like a modern version of Don Henley’s ‘Boys Of Summer’, the pleading, pained desperation of ‘Seafoam Green’ (not a cover of the Jawbreaker song of the same name), or penultimate track ‘Late Checkout’, which explodes in a burst of maudlin, defiant resignation before ‘Downwhen’ carries the record home (wherever that may be). Interestingly, that’s also one of the older songs here. Hart had the first verse and chorus for a long time, then finished it off years later, creating a strange confluence of past and present.
“A majority of that song is about revisiting where and who I was when I originally began writing it,” he says, “but attaching the context that I’m living in now is what finished it. That’s why it’s at the end. It’s the bow that puts it all together, this point in time that I’m now sealing into permanence — and now we will start the next adventure.”
‘The Midnight Motel’ tracklist:
01. Friends With Beneficiaries
02. Bridges
03. Ready To Go
04. Tilted
05. Room Keys
06. Law of Subtraction
07. The Mantle
08. Seafoam Green
09. Late Checkout
10. Downwhen