Ah, twenty-five. That strange, combustible age when time still feels like it waits for you, yet already whispers that it won’t. Jeremy Parsons, the Texas troubadour who has always worn his heart like an open secret, brings us “Who Was I”, a song that doesn’t just ask the question—it lingers in it, circles it, holds it up to the light.
Listen closely. It begins almost like a confession: “Who was I at 25 / Just a drifter on the wind getting so damn high.” It’s the kind of line you don’t so much hear as feel, like the echo of your own restless youth. The nights lived harder than the days, the dangerous dances with mortality. Parsons isn’t glamorizing it. No, he’s pulling you into the fog, showing you just how lost one can be while believing they’re free.
But there’s a twist. While his parents were raising children and bowing their heads to the comfort of faith, Jeremy was chasing smoke and shadows. He wasn’t building fences. He was breaking them. That choice—the road less taken, or maybe never meant to be taken at all—becomes the heartbeat of the track.
And then, the pivot. Nashville. The dream every songwriter has scribbled on the inside of their skin. He went, he tried, he didn’t quite make it—or at least not in the way that place demands. The lyric tells us plainly: “Made it up to Nashville, didn’t make it all. It can’t ever hurt you if it ain’t what you want.” That’s not defeat. That’s clarity. That’s a man standing on the ashes of expectation and finding warmth instead of regret.
Musically, the song is unadorned, almost stark. Acoustic chords cradle his words, letting Parsons’ voice do the heavy lifting. There’s no grand swell, no studio polish trying to cover the cracks. And that’s the brilliance of it. The cracks are the song. The wear in his tone, the pauses between verses, the quiet insistence that this story isn’t just his—it could be yours, too.
And woven through it all is perspective. A man looking back not with bitterness but with a rueful smile. He admits he didn’t know much. Who does? He admits he flirted with death, but life, somehow, carried him through. And now? He’s older, maybe wiser, and grateful for every bruise and every breath.
By the end, “Who Was I” feels less like a song and more like a reckoning. A haunting reminder that time moves fast, choices echo longer than we realize, and survival itself is sometimes the victory.
So, who was Jeremy Parsons at twenty-five? He was lost, searching, maybe a little broken. But who is he now? He’s the man who turned all that wandering into music. And in the quiet honesty of this song, he just might help you answer the same question about yourself.
–Kevin Morris