Jared Hart (Mercy Union, The Scandals) has released The Condor, a brand new, four-song EP from the revered New Jersey-based singer-songwriter. Serving as Hart’s first solo offering in 10 years, The Condor examines our mortality and the lasting imprints that close friends who have passed continue to place onto our own lives.
Featuring three originals and a cover of Mac Miller’s “Come Back To Earth,” The Condor is a rich tribute to the type of person who changes your world and your life entirely, and whose very existence makes your existence worthwhile.
If we’re lucky in our short time on this planet, we’ll meet people who mean the world to us, and who will continue to do so after they’re gone. And though death means they’re no longer here physically, their memory, their inspiration and their love remains within every person who knew them. As Ernest Hemingway apparently once said: “Every man has two deaths: when he is buried in the ground and the last time someone says his name. In some ways men can be immortal.” It’s for that very reason that The Condor, the new EP from Mercy Union/The Scandals’ Jared Hart, exists — to pay tribute to, and ensure immortality for, a friend of his.
But not just any friend. One of those rare, true friends that some people are never lucky enough to find. It was a friendship that, in a way, began out of necessity, during a Sociology 101 class at college. “There wasn’t a lot of culture there,” Hart recalls. “Not a lot of people who have experienced life. There was a lack of identity. But one day this guy walks in with a shaved head and a Minor Threat shirt, and I’m there with blue hair and a Rancid shirt. We give each other this ‘What the fuck?’ look, because we were the only two on campus like that.”
Unsurprisingly, they became close friends almost instantly, soon transforming into what Hart calls “partners in crime” when it came to both life and music. They even lived together for a while, inhabiting each other’s worlds and inspiring each other’s passions and wild, youthful eccentricities. “He would tell everyone, ‘People call me The Condor,’” continues Hart. “And a running joke was that in front of people I’d be like, ‘No one fucking called you that. There’s not a soul on earth that calls you that!’”
The last time Hart saw him was in New Jersey before the move when The Condor gave him a copy of good mmornin, Rayland Baxter’s tribute album to Mac Miller. There were plans to visit, but the day that Mercy Union’s “Prussian Blue” came out in March of 2022, Hart received an unexpected and shocking call informing him his dear friend had passed away. “When I heard the news, I became pretty useless,” he remembers. “There was so much going on with the band and everything else, but at that point it hit me like a ton of bricks. ‘Nothing is Important’. Everything stood still for a while. Making this EP was literally the only way I could attempt to make sense of any of it.”
While it’s a tragedy that this EP ever had to be made, with it, Hart has done his friend more than proud. It’s a perfect tribute, and one that assuredly secures The Condor’s immortality.
Are you going to give this one a spin?
