While driving through California’s Shasta National Forest — an area plagued by a series of forest fires — new age guitarist-composer Jake Soffer was taken aback when he spotted a single tree thriving amidst the charred remains of the surrounding forest. The powerful image evoked in Jake an ambiguous sense of tragedy mixed with hope, and it inspired the title track for his latest EP, The Tree That Remained Standing.
The metaphor of a lone tree surviving such devastation is a conceptual touchstone for Jake. He wrote the EP during a period of intense introspection where he faced the end of a relationship, made sense of pandemic isolation, and discovered his signature music sensibility. He has emerged an impressionistic composer, a clever arranger, and a multi-talented guitarist, equally adept at complex finger picked passages and dynamic clean-toned electric guitar soundscapes.
“The world being put on pause ushered in a lengthy period of self- reflection for me,” the Portland, Oregon artist shares. “I experienced the ups and downs of confronting deeply personal changes, all while living in a society enduring growing pains of its own. I found myself falling in love – over and over again – with the guitar as my instrument and voice, promising I would always use it to express the things I have no words for. I also realized after years of playing in bands that this serene and healing style was the most honest for me.”
Jake’s music conjures deep meditative moments with nature. He draws from the sounds of folk, American primitive guitar, ambient, and new age to create a unique, non-lyrical musical voice. Jake approaches the guitar as if it was an orchestra and unlocks the full tonal range, and rhythmic possibilities of the instrument. Alongside this organic and virtuosic approach, he experiments with ambient textures and looping. His work recalls the adventurous yet accessible musicality of guitarists such as Pat Metheny, John Fahey, Bill Frisell, William Tyler, Bibio, and Marisa Anderson.
Jake is formally trained, and he honed his skills playing guitar in various rock, funk, and jazz bands over the course of 15 years, most notably the jam-band funk-rock band, Easy There Tiger. He seeded the path to his solitaire musicality with his debut single, “Rose Hymn.” Next, he released his debut album, Guitar In A Room, a hypnotic solo guitar album centered around drones and ambience, a precursor to The Tree That Remained Standing era.
His latest is a transporting body of music that whisks the listener away to gorgeous imagined landscapes. Jake explains: “The word ‘escape’ has been a recurring theme for me lately. At times when the pandemic really got me down, I found solace in escaping to the natural scenery of Oregon. Being alone in the woods and other natural places allowed me to process a lot of what I was going through.”
The Tree That Remained Standing is largely a solo outing with Jake producing and mixing all the tracks and performing all the instrumentation, except for the violin on “From Sea To Sky” which was masterfully played by Grace Honeywell. On the EP, Jake plays acoustic guitar, mandolin, electric bass, electric guitar, and he programmed the drums.
The Tree That Remained Standing opens with “Ruby Red Roses,” a developed reprise of Jake’s first single, “Rose Hymn.” The song is almost a musical watercolor because of its delicate beauty, a mix of pastel electric melodies, harmonically rich acoustic guitar, ambient soundscapes, and lyrical bass playing. The song shows how Jake addresses the full-range of the guitar as an orchestral instrument, handling bass, melody, and chords. The title track showcases his deft arranging skills. It unfolds slowly and stately, like a tone poem telling the story of the survival of a lone tree. The Tree That Remained Standing also features the ambient Americana of the single, “From Sea To Sky,” and the song “Skipping Rocks.” On “Skipping Rocks” Jake employs deft Travis-style fingerpicking to paint a sonic portrait of a hammock supported by two trees. Here, his virtuosity serves the image as he captures a full-band’s worth of expression and dynamics with just a guitar.
