Photos: T.S.O.L.'s Jack Grisham Releases New Single "Anthem" With THE LIFE UNDONE
The song serves as a tribute to Grisham's wife, featuring contributions from producer Kurt Ebelhäuser and guitarist Trevor Lucca.
Jack Grisham and the Life Undone, the new project from T.S.O.L. frontman Jack Grisham, with German musician Lars Triesch, will release their self-titled debut album initially October 2 exclusively via Coda Music before dropping wide October 30 via Lost In Berlin Records. The duo has already released three singles from the record, and they dropped a fourth, 'Anthem.'
'Anthem' is an ode to Jack's wife that lives up to its title. He notes, 'My fourth wife saved my life. This one is for her—I wanted a shift in my life, a lover, a partner, my soul sacrificed.' The song's massive hook and massed vocals celebrate the absolute height of non-judgmental human connection. 'I wanted a thief at my grave / You lifted / You breathed / I'm the one that you saved.'
Jack was central to the genre-fluid, stylistically voracious sound of the original T.S.O.L., a hugely influential pillar of early 1980s SoCal punk. He also spent much of the '90s touring with Epitaph Records punk/alt-rock supergroup The Joykiller. He returned to T.S.O.L. in 1999 until their farewell shows at the turn of 2025. With that Grisham had stepped away from music and was happily writing novels and making films when a chance meeting with German musician Lars Triesch at the Punk Rock Museum in Las Vegas, offered an opportunity to make a truly authentic album with a kindred spirit.
While navigating remote songwriting 6,000 miles and nine hours apart, Jack and Lars resolved to write songs that resonated even with just a vocal and guitar. They then convened for ten days of intensive tracking at Lars' studio outside Berlin. Jack had sent Lars a playlist of ballpark references that included the Banshees, Beatles, Damned, and Who, but that went out the window once tracking began.
Lars played drums, guitar, and sang backups for Jack's vocals. They were joined by producer/multi-instrumentalist Kurt Ebelhäuser (Blackmail, Scumbucket), Lars' former collaborator in the '90s Koblenz punk scene; engineer/co-producer Michel Wern (Donots, Broilers); and Jack's onetime T.S.O.L. bandmate Trevor Lucca (D.I., Dick Dale) on guitar. Living together throughout the recording process helped bring a cohesion to Jack Grisham and the Life Undone's thirteen heartfelt tracks, despite these spanning guitar-fueled alt-rock, harmony-heavy Brit-pop, Americana-adjacent acoustic songs, and low-cal SoCal balladry.
Jack's lyrics explore sobriety, isolation and, for the first time in his 46-year career, aging. 'I've been sober for more than half of my life and on a pathway of spiritual progression,' he mulled. 'I've basically used the second half of my life to make amends for what I did in the first half.'
The Life Undone moniker refers to both the therapeutic practice of dissecting and examining someone's psychological state, and to a feeling of incompleteness, of a life still being revealed.
