Too Many Walls

“I grew up in the shadow of the tower of the old castle ruin. It was right there every time I looked North out of my parents’ living room. The church bells rang from the East every fifteen minutes,” remembers singer-songwriter, producer, guitarist, and composer Thomm Jutz of his childhood home in Germany. “I felt a strong sense of belonging elsewhere early on.” It was there that he discovered music and used it to escape. “It became my way out of a place I had to get away from. There wasn’t much wrong with that place. Something just wasn’t right with me in it.” Jutz’s latest single, “Too Many Walls,” began with those memories, but encompasses a lot more than adolescent longing to break out.

With moving into different houses, year after year, and well after leaving the home in which he was raised, Jutz found tragedy under each new roof: matter-of-factly death, at times purposeful, and once even foretold by a strange encounter with a hawk. Eventually, Jutz and his wife said enough was enough and absconded to Nashville to begin anew. “As if we hadn’t known all along that we’d have to get away for good.” It was there, much later, that Jutz understood the ultimate version of his early feelings after a dear friend passed away. “I realized that a house can be a death trap, whether it’s on fire or not.”