Advice often arrives in a raised voice, dressed as experience and offered as final fact. Jack Raymond’s “Mr. Know It All“, his second album, notices the strain such certainty places on ordinary people.
The Australian folk, roots and blues songwriter instead builds songs from doubts that do not resolve on command. Family memory, addiction, work, love, inherited belief and unequal power pass through the record.
Yet its governing figure is no all-knowing judge. The title character is deliberately abrasive, a way to narrow the distance between the person on the street and the one in a penthouse.
That premise gives this album its pressure and patience.
Raymond made his first record, The Long Story Short, while still finding his feet in a studio. For his second album, he let the songs grow with producer Ryan Tracey.
Then they spent three weeks at Scribble Gum Farm on the Sunshine Coast pulling them apart. That process reads as an artistic decision, not a bid for scale alone.
Raymond calls it the closest he has come to sounding like himself. The claim fits a record built around inquiry rather than certainty.
Again and again, each question leads back to a human circumstance.
Specific songs keep that inquiry close to the ground. “Hollow Trees” returns to Raymond’s childhood in Victoria’s High Country. There, Paulownia trees planted by his parents began to fail as their marriage did.
The image has the force of a short story, holding private history in plain view. “Prisoner” began as a response to a friend dealing with addiction, then drew Raymond himself into its frame.
Meanwhile, “Ships in the Night” follows two people building a shared future while pursuing different working lives. The record gives its characters room to be imperfect, which makes the questions feel earned rather than declared.
The album’s arrangement begins with Raymond’s folk and blues base, then opens outward. Electric guitars sit beside acoustic instruments, pads and small details that appear and recede through the songs.
That approach gives the writing a wider field without burying the stories beneath ornament. Tracey produced and engineered the album, while JB Paterson produced and engineered “Dancing in Glory.”
Angus Woodhead mixed the record at Glasshouse Studios, and Paul Blakey mastered it at 12th & Vine Post. Their roles matter because the record’s detail is not decorative. It lets the album’s questions hang in the air a little longer.
Raymond’s vocal point of view comes through writing that refuses to pose as an authority. The title character is a name with a grin and a bruise behind it.
He does not claim moral purity. Yet he tests people who speak as if their version of life is the only one. That tension gives the album a useful roughness.
It asks how an ordinary person can resist habits that make unfairness seem normal.
“Break the Mould” pushes against autopilot and the easy acceptance of an expected life. Its companion question arrives in “Carpe Diem.” It asks what happens when people pause long enough to notice their present life.
Those ideas could have turned into slogans. Raymond avoids that trap by placing them beside relationship strain, family memory and addiction.
Then “Dancing in Glory” considers inherited beliefs and the freedom to question what earlier generations handed down. “Run Yandina Run” turns to difficult stories held in Australian ground, arguing for remembrance rather than quiet erasure.
The result carries a moral seriousness without closing every door behind it. Raymond spent the year before the release touring from the Kimberley to Kings Canyon and across Australia.
He played regional towns, community halls, folk festivals and listening rooms. That setting suits his concern with people and place. The launch run paired him with Tracey and Georgia Scarlett in Brisbane.
At Mapleton and Noosa, he joined Tracey and Daryl James. Still, the album pauses when people admit what they inherited and decide what they will pass on.
That is the record’s lasting gesture. Its stories do not tidy up addiction, family fracture or the pressure to conform. They ask for a more honest view of how lives get shaped and might change.
After years spent working out what “Mountain Roots” can hold, Raymond arrives at a second album with a question still ringing: if certainty divides people so quickly, what might a little more listening repair?
