COSMO JARVIS LIVE
Fresh from supporting Muse in Devon, singer songwriter (and filmmaker, storyteller, poet, Jessica Alba enthusiast…) Cosmo Jarvis is an ordinary teenager with extraordinary talents. He’ll be showing off those talents when he plays Truro’s Wig & Pen on Wednesday 18 November.
Cosmo was born in 1990 in Ridgewood, New Jersey, making the move to Devon, England as a child. Maybe it was because there wasn’t much to do, or maybe it was just because he was so innately bloody talented, but Cosmo first began making films at home on VHS when he was barely twelve.
Around the same time he would get his first guitar and began channelling his energies into music. The way he sees it now, the two mediums can and should sit side-by side. ‘There’s more to be done with film,’ he reasons. ‘Music’s just something that I do, and making records sort of happens. Where some people write a diary, I just write songs.’
It seems perverse now that Cosmo is turning into a lyrical talent who is being whispered about in the same breaths as Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys, but he never even intended to write them. ‘Lyrics would always really annoy me, like there’d be this really great piece of music and somebody would ruin it by starting to sing over the top.’
‘My music changes from song to song. I like to write in loads of different styles because there is so much to explore. I believe that music will never be fully understood so why stop at one sound? My song subjects change as well. Some of them are about people – fictional or real. Others are about my life, places, feelings, memories, general situations, dreams, growing up, changes, girls, films, loads of other stuff as well.’
With so many thoughts and feelings pulsing through Cosmo’s 19-year-old imagination and so many different styles in which to express them, his debut album was never going to be a very conventional affair. And so his first statement to the world is divided into two segments.
The first, ‘Humasyouhitch’ you might call the ‘fun’ side, packed with playful vignettes of sexual awakening. ‘Jessica Alba’s Number’ is a light-hearted romp through the fantasy little black book of billboard girls that Cosmo will probably never date.
But it’s on the other side, ‘Sonofabitch’, that Cosmo really demonstrates the wisdom lurking in a heart that’s not so much dark as immensely human. The astonishing centre piece of the album has to be ‘Problems Of Our Own’. Its woozy sing-along and rapped verses cloak an impossibly bleak story of family breakdown made all the more bruising by the fact that it’s based, at least in part, on Cosmo’s own family life.
Already a live favourite ‘Gay Pirates’, is a tragic and poignant story of two men out of time whose forbidden love sees them forced to walk the plank. Cosmo wrote it because, though he’s straight, he thought it would be funny to write a song for rowdy, laddy-lads would sing along to with an openly gay agenda, but also because ‘there aren’t many gay songs, and I thought there should be one.’
Part of what drives Cosmo is the frustration that there simply isn’t time to do all the things that it’s possible to do. But at 19, he’s a lot further along than most of us could have hoped for. It’s this singular drive and vision that’s going to ensure Cosmo Jarvis is a fixture in our pop cultural lives for a long time.
Cosmo Jarvis plays the Wig & Pen on Wednesday 18 November with support from the brilliant Hedluv and Passman and The Coffee & TV Wreck.
THIS SHOW IS FREE ENTRY. OVER 18s ONLY. 8PM START
