Prolific, emotive and sometimes spiritual. Jeremy Drinkwine is not easy to categorize or even put into a particular genre. He's rock music with the deeper lyric. His influences range from Tom Petty to U2, The Cure, Springsteen and even Johnny Cash. Jeremy Drinkwine is a voice that is difficult to pin down to one particular influence but “that’s the adventure,” he says. “My favorite songs don't always sound the same or come from the same genre. They are the songs that feel like they’ve been written from a place that even the writer didn’t know was coming.”
Jeremy grew up in Antioch, TN, a diverse, lower middle class area just south of Nashville. The son of a baptist preacher and the oldest of five children, Jeremy spent his early years with his ears disappeared behind a pair of headphones. It wasn’t to escape and it wasn’t to avoid but to explore the wilds of music from all genres. “Growing up in a Fundamentalist Baptist home I wasn’t allowed to listen to Christian Rock or Pop music much less mainstream,” Jeremy says. “I was sheltered under Gospel Quartet music and the local oldies station. Later, I literally hid Tom Petty’s "Full Moon Fever" cassette tape under my dresser and listened to it in my closet until it cracked down the middle. Then when I heard Jane’s Addiction, The Cure, Vigilantes of Love, Nirvana, I got loud about what I loved and what I loved was music. There was no hiding anymore. I wanted to hear and create that fusion of emotion and sound all the time, everywhere. I was obsessed.”
At Overton High School, in Nashville, it was Fin. After Fin, Collier/Drinkwine and later there was Tin Charlotte. Those were the rock bands Jeremy fronted. Those were the bands he developed his voice and expression. There was moderate success with label interest and fan followings but “bands become like family” he says “and sometimes you leave the nest and comforts of home to discover new places and influences.”
As a Nashville native, the assumption has been by some that Country music is Jeremy’s primary genre of choice. However, he didn’t discover that appreciation until later in his life when he tribed up with an offbeat group of misfit songwriters at a writer’s night hosted at the Rusty Nail, a local dive bar just east of downtown Nashville. It was there he learned to write from the deeper places, the vulnerable and honest places in the corners many writers either avoid or don’t know to access.
He took that songwriting experience and wrote/recorded an EP, formed a band he called Drinkwine, played some venues out West and came back. His return was met with more downs than ups. “It was a rough time”, he said, until he met another singer/songwriter name Mercy Stevens at a writer’s night in Nashville called The Freakshow. Their meeting would prove fateful as they not only began to write and sing together but they quickly fell in love and got married in 2017. Music and writing songs became an afterthought, however, as Jeremy and Mercy took time away from their music to focus on one another and starting a family.
Three years later and the Drinkwines along with the rest of the world would experience the age of Covid-19. Like many things in that year some would die or disappear and some would rise to the surface with a fresh breath of new life. One of those new lives would be Jeremy and Mercy’s baby girl, Farrah Donna. This new birth would bring fresh energy to Jeremy and Mercy as they would form a duo group, The Easy Wild. Their debut EP “Flowers From Ashes” has been set to release May 15th, just shortly before Jeremy’s Shift Project.
Now, with The Shift Project and The Easy Wild, Jeremy is in the throes of creating deep, passionate and inspirational music and has no plans of slowing down.