JONATHAN SOMETHING
ONE MORE LONESOME COWBOY SONG
OCTOBER 16, 2026
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Jonathan Something is no stranger to transformation. Since trading in his birth name (Jonathan Searles), the critically acclaimed songwriter has shed his creative skin repeatedly, disappearing for years at a time only to return with a radically reimagined sound and fresh lyrical perspective. But even for a lifelong chameleon, Searles’ mesmerizing new album, One More Lonesome Cowboy Song, marks a radical departure. Or maybe it’s an arrival. Given all he’s been through, even Searles isn’t too sure.
“I’m definitely in a better place now than I was when I started the record,” he reflects. “At the same time, though, I don’t feel like I’m a finished product. Most of these songs are about trying to understand something, about trying to come to terms with some truth about the human condition, and that’s a process that never really ends.”
It’s a process Searles renders with deep insight and tender empathy on One More Lonesome Cowboy Song. Recorded and produced by Searles, who also plays all of the instruments, the collection is gentle and hypnotic, drawing you in with an intimate, understated delivery that’s at once aching and beautiful. The songwriting is indeed rooted in the cosmic cowboy tradition of Gram Parsons or Gene Clark, but the recordings share more in common with Neutral Milk Hotel or Elliott Smith, layering up fingerpicked acoustic and electric guitars with hushed, serenely doubletracked vocals. The result is an album that manages to feel both lush and raw at the same time, a captivating inner monologue of a record that finds comfort in slowing down, tuning in, and making peace with the moment, no matter how uncomfortable it may be.
“It feels like everyone’s moving so fast through life these days that we don’t ever stop and think about what we’re doing or why we’re doing it,” Searles muses. “These songs all came to me in little epiphanies when I finally slowed down enough to hear my own thoughts.”
Born and raised in Brooklyn, CT, Searles grew up enthralled with music but conflicted about the industry and its rigid constraints. He studied production at Berklee but left before graduating, moving briefly to California to pursue studio work before returning to the East Coast to focus on his own material. Searles’ early albums were well-received, but they were also entirely unpredictable, ranging in style from blistering garage rock and quirky anti-folk to retro synthpop and sample-laden neo-soul. NPR’s Slingshot series, which highlights the best new music on public radio, hailed Searles as “delightfully bizarre,” while The Line of Best Fit declared that “he’s thrown out whatever rulebook he went by (if there ever was one).”
“I’ve always made music that filled in the gaps of whatever I was listening to at any particular moment,” Searles explains. “I wasn’t interested in sticking to any specific sound or following what anyone’s expectations of me might happen to be.”
Searles worked at a rapid clip, often writing and recording entire albums in the span of a month, but when he finally stopped moving long enough to catch his breath in 2020, he realized that the whole experience had left him with more questions than answers.
“I was finding it hard to identify with being an artist anymore,” he confesses. “It didn’t bring me the same joy or comfort it used to, and I found that the only way for me to really enjoy music again was to stop making it.”
So Searles put his guitar aside and found work running audio and visual setups for the next several years. He considered exploring alternative creative paths like screenwriting and filmmaking, but instead, a mysterious illness and a painful back injury led to an unexpected reunion with songwriting.
“I used to hate smoking weed because it made me so paranoid,” Searles recalls, “but I found that it really helped with the pain, so I started doing it regularly. Somewhere along the way, I realized it changed my perspective on things, too, like I was splitting into two people, and the second person—less inhibited, more creative—was ready to make music again.”
Searles’ excitement about returning to music soon turned to dread, though, one afternoon at his parents’ house.
“I was sitting at their piano, smoking weed and playing these jazzy minor chords when suddenly I was overcome with a kind of anxiety I’d never experienced,” he recalls. “It was like the floor fell out from under me, like there was a room full of guns pointed at me, like I’d summoned all of the worst physical and emotional sensations I’d ever experienced, and they were taking over my mind and my body at once.”
Searles sank into a deep depression for days, unable to make sense of the episode or shake the lingering malaise that followed it.
“Eventually, I realized that I needed to turn it into something useful,” he explains. “I realized I needed to use it as a catalyst to start thinking more seriously about spirituality and growth and the changes I needed to make in my life. And that journey became One More Lonesome Cowboy Song.”
Searles’ probing self-reflections lie at the heart of the album, though the record is decidedly more existential than autobiographical. “Everything’s a guess / I do believe I have begun / To redefine the things / I thought I knew when I was young,” he sings on “The Garden,” his voice rising and falling like a soothing tide. “The power and passion / And the pleasure and the pain / Was it an illusion / Or just one big silly game?” Like much of the album, the song offers little in the way of answers or prescriptions, positing instead that any time spent reflecting on such fundamental questions about our humanity is its own reward. “’You’ll never know if it was real or just a dream’ / When you’re running on gasoline,” he reminds us on the poignant “Gasoline.”
“We’re all just going nonstop in our own little realities,” says Searles, who found himself drawn to meditation and Eastern philosophy during the making of the album. “Unless you learn to turn off that tunnel vision, you’ll never be able to look inside yourself and figure out who you really are or what you really want.”
It’s a challenge Searles grapples with frequently on the album. The dreamy “Siren Song” learns to see beyond the mirage of the material world and find deeper meaning, while the infectious “One Step More” chooses to carry on, no matter how difficult it may seem, and the hazy album opener “Country Rose” aims to find a slower, more satisfying path through life, with Searles singing, “We could take the dirt road back to heaven / Or we could take the highway if you'd like / 'Cause the breeze feels good and the view looks nice.”
“I wanted to get myself to a place where I could enjoy making music for the sake of it, where I could create without needing to get anything out of it,” says Searles. “That’s why I wanted to start things off with ‘Country Rose.’ It’s probably the most autobiographical tune on the album, and it really sets up the slow, meditative mood of the whole record.
It’s perhaps the entrancing closer “Before I Go,” though, that best encapsulates Searles’ growth on the album, as he discovers that true contentment arrives only when you finally stop chasing it. “I’m waiting on the sun to shine / To keep my feet from getting cold,” he sings. “Just when I thought the well ran dry / Come Friday night it’s overflowed.”
“The cowboy of the album title is metaphorical,” Searles explains. “It’s that dark, brooding, reclusive part of myself that didn’t know how to be happy. This record is my farewell to him.”
For for Jonathan Something, it’s just another in a long line of transformations.
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