Music

Kyle Davis Returns With Soul-Stirring New Album ‘Jericho’

Music Observer Contributor

May 14, 2025

By: Kara Sterling

By the time the first notes of Kyle Davis’s Jericho settle in, it’s clear this marks a powerful and reflective return. Released last month, Jericho is the Virginia-based singer-songwriter’s first full-length album since 2020’s Make It Count, and it may be his most arresting work to date. The record is a slow-burning, soul-searching odyssey through grief, recovery, and redemption that reads like a personal journal and plays like a cinematic experience.

A Soundtrack for Picking Up the Pieces

Produced by longtime collaborator Don Dixon (R.E.M., The Smithereens), Jericho unfolds with the weight of lived experience. Davis’s lyricism has always leaned introspective, but here it’s unflinching. The title track sets the tone with its meditation on dismantling material illusions in favor of something more lasting: self-forgiveness. “Not all of them fit together the same way anymore, but enough do,” Davis says of the record’s central metaphor, reassembling a self shattered by loss.

The album’s emotional core resonates in standout tracks like “On a Ledge,” where Davis lays bare the chasm between public persona and private despair. “Sail Away” drifts in on soft currents of acceptance, an aching yet soothing piece about how love, like water, can slip through your fingers even as it carries you forward.

Davis’s strength has always been his storytelling, blending Jackson Browne’s confessional poise, Peter Gabriel’s spiritual depth, and Bill Withers’s grounded soul. Jericho follows that tradition with tracks that could easily be mistaken for pages from a memoir. “The Last Line” examines life’s quiet desperation and fierce hope, blending ordinary imagery with extraordinary longing.

Elsewhere, “Passengers” captures a communal spirit of survival, a reminder that people are constantly finding their way through life together. In “Now and Again,” Davis conveys the guilt-tinged grace of moving forward after profound loss, haunted by absence, held together by memory.

Much of Jericho was tracked at Mitch Easter’s studio in Winston-Salem, with additional sessions in Davis’s home studio and at Richmond’s Elephant Ear Studio. The album reunites Davis with a stellar lineup: Dixon on bass and keys, Peter Holsapple on piano and mandolin, Mike Durham and Corey Wells on electric guitar, Rob Ladd on drums, and Hayes Elverston on harp. Davis himself plays guitar and piano, his voice carrying the weary clarity of someone who’s survived the long night.

A Veteran Voice with a Timeless Echo

Davis has shared stages with the likes of Bob Dylan and Hall & Oates, garnered praise from Rolling Stone and Billboard, and had multiple songs chart on Triple AAA radio. But Jericho is less about accolades and more about arrival. It’s the work of a man who’s lived, loved, lost, and come back with something honest to say.

“As I look back on making Jericho, I realize that creating records is a form of therapy for me,” Davis says. “Not every song is entirely first-person, but the themes of grief, resilience, and reflection are universal.”

Kyle Davis Returns With Soul-Stirring New Album ‘Jericho’

Photo Courtesy: Kyle Davis Music

Final Verdict: Don’t Sleep on This One

If you’ve ever stared down the broken pieces of your life and wondered how or if you’d ever put them back together, Jericho is your soundtrack. It’s a companion for the hard moments; a map for finding meaning when the lights go out.

Jericho is available now on all major platforms. Stream it, sit with it, let it pull you under, and maybe, piece by piece, you’ll find yourself again, too.