Singer-songwriter Odd Marshall mixes elements of alternative, folk-rock and Americana on his sophomore album Seconds (out Mar. 6) with the help of Blind Melon guitarists Rogers Stevens and Christopher Thorn (who also produced and mixed the album), Foo Fighters keyboardist Rami Jaffee and Mathias Schneeberger of The Afghan Whigs on clavinet. Seconds feels like a neon-lit night spent drifting between desert dive bars and dreamscapes, where Odd Marshall’s revolutionary spirit could just as easily take us to the next great party or burn it all down.

Odd Marshall’s debut LP Sand & Glue (2024), produced by Canadian indie legend Don Kerr (Neko Case, Ron Sexsmith, The Weather Station), reached #55 on the NACC Top 200—the #1 self-released debut. Singles ‘Midsummer’ and ‘What You Take’ performed well on SiriusXM and CBC, respectively.

Seconds kicks off with “Run,” a call to action, a song to incite a revolution. At first, its non-aggressive J.J. Cale style drumbeat trucks steadily along before slowly building to an intense climax. The guitars utilize light patterns and groovy flourishes up and down the neck between the lyrics. It’s playful, but grows angry with the singalong chorus of “You better run motherfucker / run motherfucker run.” The mellow vibe ironically contrasts against the violent lyrics of the song.

“There was a murder in the town next to me of a Bangladeshi restaurant owner,” says Odd Marshall. “A guy visiting from England was confronted after attempting to dine-and-dash. He punched the owner in the head, killing him. The entire community came together in anger around this. Thankfully, the killer was caught three years later in Edinburgh. This song isn’t entirely about that murder for me anymore. We’re a generation that’s been wronged. The life we’ve been promised isn’t available to us. It’s time to take down those motherfuckers who raised us on lies!”

“You can take the specific and turn it into the universal, like he does in ‘Run,’” says Stevens. “Say you're in a conflict in your own life, and you're driving down the road listening to this record. Well, that ‘run motherfucker run’ lyric lands for you, right? It's become universal. It's no longer about some incident in a small town.”

The pulsing and hypnotic “Somebody New” is a moody, swag-rock, make-out anthem. It finds Odd Marshall hitting some Howlin’ Wolf ‘ooh oohs’ and includes a menacing slide guitar solo from Thorn. “I asked a lady about this new girl at the bar, and she didn’t like the boyfriend so she told me to go for it. It’s a real gossipy song,” laughs Odd Marshall.

The mysterious Twin Peaks-esque adventure of “Take Me Anywhere” tells the sexy story of a woman leading a man through a twisting dreamscape of a flirtatious yet fleeting romance. “I woke up from this dream and had to write the adventure down,” says Odd Marshall. “I love Bob Dylan songs with a thousand words and a steady beat, so this is my version of ‘Tangled Up In Blue,’ Hurricane’ or ‘Isis.’” 

Driving rocker “Way Out” deals with the frustration of being in the wrong place in your life through crunchy guitars and Stevens’ grooving wah pedal. There’s a silver lining in the lyric, “There’s a new world / If you want it / But it’s not the one you dream about.” Maybe the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, but for now “we all hate where we are.”

“Wreck Your Life (For Rock n’ Roll)” is an homage to Odd Marshall’s own teenage musical education. It has an energetic ‘70s pop-rock charm that follows in the hereditary line of the Rolling Stones “It’s Only Rock’n’Roll (But I Like It)” or KISS’ “Rock and Roll All Nite,” where one can imagine a carload of long-haired delinquents smoking weed on their way to an Odd Marshall show singing along to: “A landslide / A Street fight / Devil’s symphony soul / All night / After midnight / Wreck your life for rock n’ roll.” Schneeberger’s clavinet solo gives the song a hint of Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.”

“I saw a Rolling Stones video with the sound off, and was intrigued by Mick Taylor’s big broad strumming pattern. Without knowing the song or the riff, I started playing to that tempo and the original verse riff just landed on the fretboard. This song reminds me of riding in my dad’s truck as a kid listening to the oldies station, and my early music discovery in general. It’s a lyrical collage with around 25 references from bands like: The Who, Van Morrison, John Lennon, Lou Reed, Andy Kim, The Tragically Hip, Eddie Vedder… When I sing ‘Let me / Write my / name on the face of today’ is a misheard Shannon Hoon lyric. The title comes from what—at times—is the sacrifice we make to be musicians these days,” laughs Odd Marshall.

The laid back mellow-rocker “On My Way” is a song of longing as Odd Marshall reminisces about a failed relationship. While living in New York he was dating a girl, but took a job that put him on a ship sailing through the Panama Canal. The plan was to reunite on the West Coast, but the ship got rerouted down and around South America. This extended the trip by three months, and essentially killed that relationship. “I’m a thousand miles away / but I can’t let go/ I still want more / I’m on my way,” he sings.

The breakup ballad “Hold Me Together” is a desperate plea when you know you’re the problem in a nosediving relationship. There’s frustration and regret in Odd Marshall’s vocals. This song is more of an admission of guilt than an overt apology. “I wrote it towards the end of my time in England,” says Odd Marshall. “It’s an amalgamation of failed relationships from my time in London.”

Album closer “Outta Here” has a bluesy country twang and can apply to leaving any bad situation: a divorce anthem, motivation to quit your job, or simply moving out and moving on, but for Odd Marshall this is a song about a teenager who wanted more out of life, working up the courage to leave his small town behind.

“I wrote this riff in high school while listening to Blind Melon,” the songwriter recalls. “When I sing, ‘So much more outside of these doors, but you’re afraid of change,’ it comes almost directly from their song ‘Change.’ I left home as soon as I could, but have since realized small towns are precious.”

Seconds is an exorcism of the places Odd Marshall has left behind, bridging the gap between the restless teenager on the back porch and the seasoned traveler who’s seen the world and found it wanting. It’s a gritty and soulful reminder that the ghosts of who you were will always follow you, and sometimes meeting your heroes can be life changing.

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Odd Marshall played guitar in his first band in high school. He wrote the main riff to “Outta Here” during these early sessions in the ‘90s. He was living and breathing the albums of Blind Melon, and would be shocked to know he made a record with them decades later. Largely because he went to film school and left his guitar at home. He moved to London when he was 24 with the dream of directing TV commercials and music videos like Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry. When that didn’t exactly work out as planned, he picked up a guitar and started writing songs instead of just riffs. That led to small gigs and open mics.

“I played a songwriter night where I was one of the opening acts at a place called The Ginglik in Shepherd's Bush,” he recalls “I was nervous and terrified just getting through my three songs, then some kid gets up as the featured act and plays for 90 minutes with looping pedals and a million words. He didn't break a sweat. I sheepishly talked to the guy about making a music video with him. ‘I’m actually more of a filmmaker,’ I probably told him, deflecting from my amateur set. He said, ‘Oh, cool. I'm just going to Los Angeles, but maybe when I get back we could do something.’ The kid's name was Ed Sheeran, and he never came back. I think I’ve got a MySpace message from him.”

Odd Marshall recorded some demos during this time, but nothing came of it. He directed TV commercials in Bollywood, India, went to Carnegie Mellon for a degree in interactive storytelling, moved to Beijing, China, and then the following year to Brooklyn, New York. There he worked under Oscar-winning, now-disgraced, super producer Scott Rudin. He began writing screenplays and his first novel drawing from two very different experiences: one, as an expat in China, and the other delivering ice cream around New York City, which was nearly optioned by Rudin. That interaction gained Odd Marshall an agent, and so he left New York for his family’s cabin in the desolate woods to write his second novel about his time in London working for notorious white-collar criminal Marc Rich.

“New York put me in some pretty bad debt,” says Odd Marshall. “While living in this cabin, I was working the night-shift at a grocery store in the middle of nowhere, stocking shelves for an 18-year-old boss with his name tattooed on his neck. It got me reminiscing about fonder days in London. The products on the shelves haunted me, reminding me of my poor life choices in my 20s. I’ve now written four novels and 15 screenplays. I’ve got one screenplay about my grandpa’s adventures in WWII, another about a car thief I went to high school with, but my favorite is the one about the invention of mini-golf.”

Odd Marshall was living in the cabin, the walls lined with screenplays and manuscripts, when a November winter storm rolled in. He was driving down a side road in when his truck slid on a patch of snowy ice, spun around and rolled the truck into a ditch. Luckily he was uninjured and crawled out of the passenger-side window. If it had happened ten feet in either direction he would’ve hit a telephone pole.

“I looked at the wreckage, and realized how sick I was of being a hermit,” says Odd Marshall. “I was sitting in the service station where they towed the truck, and a song came on the radio. I wish I could remember what song it was, because I remember the distinct feeling of holding a guitar. I used to do that. I used to play guitar. The next day I started learning my songs again.”

From there he started driving two or three hours to play two or three songs at open mics and, eventually, restaurant gigs. 15 years prior on a flight to London, Odd Marshall met Canadian musician BD Harrington, and was taken by his album The Kid Strays, produced by Don Kerr. 15 years later he reached out to Kerr with some demos in a cold email, and they recorded his album Sand & Glue (2024) together… not two years after the course-correcting accident.

“I sent Don like 40 demos,” says Odd Marshall. “We narrowed it down to the eleven songs on the record. Don put the band together with Mike O’Brien on guitar and Jason Haberman on bass. I was definitely punching above my weight, but they gave me the confidence to build my songs with them. I came in with a sketch, and the songs grew exponentially from there. Don’s a great person, and I really felt like I was in his care.”

The debut LP’s title Sand & Glue comes from a Bowie lyric describing Bob Dylan’s voice, and Odd Marshall felt a kinship with that sentiment. The record tackles personal failure, addiction, local food spots and his time in Sweden. “Midsummer” did well with some radioplay and SiriusXM. But it was “Lucky Dragon” that had an aggressive attitude that carried on to this new album. The Sand & Glue album cover is a photo taken by his father in the Sahara Desert. It depicts a weathered figure drinking from a jug next to a guitar on a sand dune. The song “Tomorrow Never Comes” describes finding his late father’s journals and photos five years after he died—adventures from ‘66-’72: trapping possums in New Zealand, climbing Kilimanjaro and losing a kidney in Perth, Australia.

“My dad went blind after 25 years of working with blind children,” he says. “The year he was supposed to retire, he got cancer on his optic nerve. It spread through his brain, down his spinal cord and eventually took over. He passed away in June of 2000 as I finished my first year of film school. There’s a screenplay about that too, and now I'm living in the cabin that would’ve been his retirement place.”

Odd Marshall was gearing up for the next record, thinking about who was most influential in his musical life, and he kept coming back to the band Blind Melon. He discovered that Blind Melon guitarist/multi-instrumentalist/producer Christopher Thorn had just opened his Fireside Studio in Joshua Tree, California. He reached out, and within an hour was on the phone talking to one of his childhood heroes. Eight months later Odd Marshall was there recording the album that would be his upcoming release Seconds with Thorn producing and playing guitar alongside his Blind Melon bandmate Rogers Stevens also on guitar. Odd Marshall played acoustic guitar, Jon Ossman was on bass, and Denny Weston Jr. on drums.

“When I left my cabin, the snow had fallen off the roof to block my exit. I snowshoed 45 minutes to get to my truck, to get to the airport, to get to Joshua Tree,” says Odd Marshall. “Christopher and his wife Heather built an incredible complex that is now Fireside Studios on 35 acres on the outskirts of Joshua Tree. They have little cottages on the property that we stayed in. I’d never been to the desert before. It was like being on the moon. The full sky every night was so quiet with sparkling lights on the hillside. It's its own little bubble. For me, it was a perfect two weeks, unlike any other in my life.”

“You can make a lot of noise and no one will ever hear you,” says Stevens of the desert. “It's sort of like being on Mars. It can be an intense environment, the climate and all that. It instantly puts you in a different headspace. I do love that climate, but I'm like a lizard. This album was sort of sprung on me by Christopher. He said, ‘Hey, I met this guy that I'm going to make a record for. He's got good songs and he really wants both of us.’ And I said to Christopher, ‘Well, there you go. You can't do this without me.’ He wanted that two-guitar thing that Christopher and I do. Our hands are never on the same place on the guitar at the same time, like an orchestral art.”

“I knew that I also wanted a keyboard player,” says Odd Marshall. “Christopher called a guy that he used to work in a shoe shop with when he first moved to Los Angeles in the late ‘80s. That guy turned out to be Rami Jaffee, who’s now a member of the Foo Fighters. Christopher has been in The Afghan Whigs, Unified Theory and Awolnation. Rogers went off and became a lawyer and has done a few projects on the side like Extra Virgin, The Tender Trio and Towne & Stevens, but this is the first project that Christopher and Rogers have played on outside of Blind Melon, which is significant. I chose these songs, written over a great period of time, to allow these guys to shine. I didn’t shy away from the guitar work. I’m not ashamed to say I wanted to relive my childhood fandom.”

“His lyrics are top shelf,” says Stevens. “He’s like a more esoteric Tom Petty. His personality is distinct and comes through. He's the real deal. There's some people who can connect their voice to their words and it's simply undeniable. Christopher and I haven't done this like this since probably 1994, where we're in a room writing and tracking our guitars. We were all in that room with Odd Marshall playing the acoustic guitar and singing all at once. Man, that felt great. It felt like magic in that room. Everybody there was inspired.”

Seconds utilizes the legendary Thorn and Stevens articulate guitar phrasing as instruments in conversation with one another. It has a driving energy and pounding drums that you can stomp your feet to. Its dark and aggressive lyrics confront anger, regret, revenge and disgust from different times in Odd Marshall’s life. From the teenage angst of “Outta Here,” to the looking back at the good ole days of “Wreck Your Life (For Rock 'n' Roll),” Seconds repackages ‘90s rock into something modern. It has a lineage to ‘70s songsmiths like Neil Young and Van Morrison, grunge classics like Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy and Nirvana Unplugged, and the high-energy interlocking guitars of contemporary bands acts like Noah Kahan or Wilco.

“The songs I wrote when I was younger were more complex and I hated playing them live. I’ve learned that you can win over a rowdy crowd with two chords and the truth instead of complex key changes. The songs I chose for Seconds are inspired by the rooms I’ve played. My songwriting discipline is now more informed by time spent writing novels and screenplays.”

The album title Seconds isn’t just about it being Odd Marshall’s second album, but about second chances and second helpings after abandoning music for so long. This album is like a rebirth. The metaphorical, stark grey-and-black album art (a photo taken by Odd Marshall in Kunming, China of a lonely man working rice fields at dawn) shows many paths, yet none are straight and their destinations are unknown.

“I remember one day [Odd Marshall] found out that there was a little radio station down the hill in Joshua Tree,” says Stevens, “and he did it old school. He drove straight over there by himself, met the program director, and got his record on the radio as if he were driving around in Mississippi in 1964. I respected that, you know. He's got the hustle.”

“This album is for the teenage version of myself,” says Odd Marshall. “I was super proud of the first album. It exceeded my expectations, but releasing as a complete unknown sometimes felt like I was screaming at the wall. I’m in outreach mode now, playing 50-60 nights this coming summer to connect with the people. I’m building my audience, even if it’s one person at a time.”

Track list:

01 Run

02 Somebody New

03 Take Me Anywhere

04 Way Out

05 Wreck Your Life (For Rock 'n' Roll)

06 On My Way

07 Hold Me Together

08 Outta Here

Album Credits Odd Marshall - Seconds

All songs written by Odd Marshall

Produced and Mixed by Christopher Thorn

Engineered by Devlin Thorn

Recorded at Fireside Studios in Joshua Tree, CA

Mastered by Philip Shaw Bova

Additional Mixing by RHC Music

Executive Produced by Scott Pielsticker

Odd Marshall - acoustic guitar

Jon Ossman - bass

Denny Weston Jr. - drums

Rogers Stevens - electric guitar

Christopher Thorn - electric guitar, piano, organs

Rami Jaffee - piano, organs

Mathias Schneeberger - clavinet

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