While it’s rare for a musician to drop two studio albums within a year, JM Stevens says there was no grand scheme to release Wish on a River Bridge, his third solo effort, a mere 11 months after its predecessor.

The seasoned singer-songwriter, with no one to answer to, simply felt free and eager to “make the best music I can, where I am in this moment in time, and get it out in the world.”

“The longer you sit on songs, there’s the chance they might marinate a little too long, and it’s so easy to talk yourself out of things,” the Austin, Texas-based Stevens says.

Going back to his days fronting Moonlight Towers, a South by Southwest festival mainstay throughout the rock band’s 15-plus year history, JM Stevens has always let his music do the talking — and Wish on a River Bridge speaks volumes. Stevens is at his most captivating and introspective, channeling the starkness of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska and the acoustic clarity of Tom Petty’s Wildflowers as he gives voice to protagonists who are navigating old beginnings, new starts and myriad in-betweens with lyrical precision on par with Jason Isbell.

While he toured in 2024 promoting his second solo album, Nowhere to Land — driving from gig to gig with his acoustic guitars and harmonicas — Stevens worked the 10 Wish on a River Bridge songs into shape during his solo shows. After returning to Austin in summer 2024, Stevens wasted little time getting to work tracking the River Bridge material.

“I’m sitting here with a studio in my backyard,” says Stevens, referring to East Austin Recording, “and I’d like to think I know a little about making records at this point, or at least I ought to. I’ve been doing this stuff in some fashion since I was a kid messing around with makeshift recorders, so it was just a matter of diving in and following my heart.”

Ever the craftsman, Stevens gave some extra thought to his road-tested new songs back at home, editing some lyrics and adding a bridge here or dropping a verse there as needed. One consideration he nixed rather quickly was to build on his acoustic guitar, harmonica and vocals with instrumentation that would have given the recordings a full-band arrangement.

“I realized doing that was taking the vibe to the wrong place for this batch of songs — it just didn’t have the same emotional impact, and I’d never done a stripped-down album like this before,” he explains. “It felt like a bold move and a challenge to myself to go in that direction, as there’s nothing to hide behind.”

Aside from some sporadic atmospheric sounds via keyboards and accordion that were played by Johnny “Keys” Grossman (Uncle Lucius), Wish on a River Bridge is all Stevens. His original goal, “just to prove to myself that I could do it,” was to release the album in the same calendar year as Nowhere to Land, but not sticking to that desired deadline turned out to be beneficial in the end.

Stevens mixed River Bridge in December 2024, but there was still an important task that needed to be done outside of the studio. “Whenever I record something,” he says, “I have to listen to how it makes me feel, how it sounds to me, when I’m driving around the neighborhood or down the highway.”

So when he set off to visit relatives in his native Mississippi for the holidays, Stevens’ soundtrack for the drive was the River Bridge mix. Checking it out right along with him was Stevens’ daughter. “She can be a tough critic, and it’s really interesting how things can sound very different when someone else is sitting there experiencing it with you,” he says. “Sometimes things pop out that were missed before, or maybe a lyric feels not quite right.”

The road-test listen prompted Stevens to put aside his original mixdown to half-inch tape and remix the album to quarter-inch tape. “I was looking to give it more of a vintage sound with a bit more squeeze — or as I sometimes say, throw some dust on it.”

That road trip to Mississippi, along with a deep-rooted childhood memory, inspired the album title.

“For as long as I can remember back to when I was kid, every time we crossed a bridge, my old man would make us hold our breath and put a hand on the roof of the car while making a wish,” Stevens recalls, “and if you made it across without taking a breath, hopefully that wish would come true. It’s a tradition that I still carry on.”

He adds, “So we’re on that trip, and we’re doing the ritual over the bridge rolling into Memphis as we’d been listening to the album. I’d never said ‘wish on a river bridge,’ those exact words in that way, but I just said it then. And I was like, ‘I think that could be a really cool album title.’ I kept coming back to it over the next few days, and it kept feeling right and seemed to fit the music.”

Those exact words, paired with a photo taken while he was on tour, now grace the cover of JM Stevens’ latest solo album, released March 7, 2025, on his own Crosstie Records.

“I think the title may conjure up different things to different people, and I’ve talked to a few who knew exactly the folklore I was talking about,” he says. “For me, it’s about memories and those little moments in life that carry on, and even through the rough spots hoping for something good up ahead.”

By Chris M. Junior