Reviewing Miles Jenson’s Orchestral Jazz-Inspired Single ‘North Star’
Photo credit: Isaac Lamb
Miles Jenson Delivers A Duo of Orchestral Jazz-Inspired Singles ‘Against My Best Interests’ & ‘North Star’
Standing beneath half-mast American flags in Austin, Texas, watching the skyline of a city crackling with political tension, Miles Jenson found the image that would become 'North Star': the promise of a better tomorrow that keeps moving further away while people are encouraged to blame their neighbours instead of the systems that exploit them. It is not a comfortable image. It was not meant to be.
'North Star' is the focus single from a pair of new orchestral releases, both produced and arranged by Vincent Ott, that mark a significant expansion of what Jenson's music is capable of reaching. His debut EP Sunshine Goldmine, produced by Grammy-winning duo King Garbage and awarded Best Indie Song of 2025 at the Indie Boulevard Music Awards, earned widespread praise for its theatrical soul and unflinching social examination. These new singles embrace lush orchestration and jazz-influenced songwriting to push that examination further, outward and upward in scale.
'North Star' interrogates the relationship between class inequality and racial division with a directness that few songwriters currently bring to the form.
"At the root of hate is fear," Jenson explains. "American fear is born from resource deprivation that informs a scarcity mindset, while capitalist mythology tells us that meritocracy will solve everything."
The song maps the intersection of white supremacy and classism not as abstract political theory but as a fracture in the lives of working people who share more with each other than with the systems keeping them afraid of one another.
The jazz tradition Jenson draws from, informed by Donny Hathaway, Otis Redding, Chet Baker and the orchestral ambition of Fiona Apple and Radiohead, gives 'North Star' its sonic architecture: warm and sweeping on the surface, carrying underneath it an ominous tension that mirrors the song's thematic terrain. Companion single 'Against My Best Interests' turns the same musical intelligence inward, examining the grey area between self-improvement and self-destruction where, as Jenson observes, most of us actually live.
The full-length debut with King Garbage is in development. On the evidence of these singles, it is going to be something extraordinary.
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