By Mason Calloway
Country music has never lacked songs about looking backward. There are old flames, old trucks, old hometowns and old photographs enough to fill every jukebox between Austin and Aberdeen. What separates Jeremy Parsons’ “Who Was I”
from the usual exercise in nostalgia is that Parsons doesn’t seem especially interested in making the past look prettier than it was.
He wants to know what the heck he was thinking.
Taken from Parsons’ five-song Life EP, “Who Was I” is a wonderfully plainspoken piece of autobiographical country-Americana about the distance between being 25 and understanding what being 25 actually meant. Parsons wrote it after a critic suggested his previous album, Things To Come, didn’t reveal enough about his personal life. What started as a slightly cheeky response became a serious examination of his younger self and everything he has learned since.
The joke, then, is on the critic. He got considerably more Jeremy Parsons than he bargained for.
Parsons begins by describing himself at 25 as a drifter getting high, sleeping away the daylight and apparently testing whether youthful recklessness came with an expiration date. There’s nothing coy about the recollection. He doesn’t turn the behavior into outlaw-country mythology, nor does he subject his younger self to a sanctimonious lecture.
He simply reports the evidence.
That restraint is crucial.
Plenty of country singers have discovered that yesterday’s bad decisions make excellent promotional copy once they’re safely in yesterday. Parsons isn’t polishing his mistakes into credentials. His vocal delivery has the warmth and conversational ease of somebody telling you this story across a table rather than performing a confession beneath a spotlight.
The production understands that distinction. Dustin Martin produced Life and handled an unusually broad collection of instrumentation, while Michael Flanders contributes steel guitar, Caleb Flanders plays bass and Chris Tuttle is among the piano contributors. The resulting sound surrounds Parsons without crowding him.
The lyric remains boss.
And there’s a terrific generational tension running through it.
By the age Parsons was busy pursuing nights and songs, his parents had already done the respectable things. There was a house, children, education and faith. Parsons looks at that traditional blueprint without quite mocking it and without pretending it was ever his blueprint.
He wanted to sing.
Country music has spent generations romanticising precisely that decision: leave home, chase the dream, make Nashville surrender.
Parsons supplies the missing second act.
He went to Nashville.
Nashville didn’t surrender.
Then Parsons moved back in with his father at 32.
That’s a country song.
The remarkable thing is how little self-pity Parsons attaches to it. He doesn’t treat returning home as proof that the dream failed. Neither does he manufacture some triumphant Hollywood moment where every setback suddenly makes perfect sense. Life rarely provides such tidy accounting.
Instead, Parsons delivers the song’s most penetrating thought when he wonders, in effect, whether he’s chasing the dream or the dream is chasing him.
Anybody who has spent years trying to make music professionally should understand that question immediately.
There comes a point when ambition stops being something you do and becomes something you are. You’ve driven too many miles, played too many rooms, written too many songs and sacrificed too much certainty to easily separate the person from the pursuit.
Parsons knows something about persistence. The San Antonio-born songwriter has released three full-length records, toured in the United States and Europe, accumulated more than 1.5 million Spotify streams, and seen songs from the Life era achieve significant independent chart success. His official biography notes that “Life Worth Dyin’ For” topped both National Radio Hits AC40 and Country airplay charts.
None of that turns “Who Was I” into an I-told-you-so song.
Thank goodness.
Instead, success merely gives Parsons enough distance to examine failure without fearing it.
That makes “Who Was I” particularly effective within Life. The EP is concerned with growth, identity and what experience does to our understanding of ourselves. Parsons has described the project as deeply personal, and “Who Was I” is its most naked piece of autobiography.
There’s even something distinctly Texas about the way Parsons handles it. Not Texas in the increasingly meaningless sense of throwing a fiddle onto a record and photographing somebody beside a Lone Star flag, but in the older singer-songwriter tradition where the story matters more than the costume.
Parsons’ strength is specificity.
Twenty-five.
Nashville.
Thirty-two.
Dad’s house.
Those details transform a generic song about “following your dreams” into an actual human life.
Most importantly, Parsons understands something Nashville occasionally forgets: a protagonist doesn’t have to be admirable to be sympathetic.
The young man in “Who Was I” isn’t presented as somebody listeners should imitate. He’s reckless, uncertain, arrogant enough to believe there must be something beyond the conventional path and naïve enough not to know what that something is.
In other words, he’s young.
The older Parsons regards him with equal measures of amusement, affection and disbelief. He knows things now that the kid couldn’t have known then. He also understands that today’s wisdom was purchased with yesterday’s mistakes.
“Who Was I” therefore isn’t really about regret.
It’s about reconciliation.
Parsons isn’t trying to kill his younger self, rescue him or rewrite his decisions. He’s simply acknowledging that every version of Jeremy Parsons, the drifter, the Nashville hopeful, the thirtysomething back under his father’s roof, and the seasoned working songwriter, belongs to the same story.
That’s country music’s natural territory.
Not perfection.
Not nostalgia.
Life as it was actually lived.
And on “Who Was I,” Jeremy Parsons tells it exceptionally well.
