Jonathan Sexton and the Big Love Choir

A couple of years ago, right after his former band Whiskey Scars broke up, Jonathan Sexton took a break from music—a long break. He moved into a lonely, isolated spot in South Knoxville and went back to graduate school.
“It was over a year,” he says. “And for the biggest part of that I didn’t even play guitar. I had too much other stuff on me. I couldn’t be as indulgent as I wanted to be so I didn’t do it at all. Part of me thought at the time that I could never top what I did with Whiskey Scars. I didn’t want to just rip off what we’d been doing, but I didn’t know who I was and what I wanted to do. I had to live and find out what I had to say.”
After finishing grad school, Sexton started working as a kindergarten teacher at a school in East Knox County. The start of a new chapter in his life freed him from the burdens of past associations and encouraged him to start playing and writing again. When he finally picked up his guitar after the long layoff, he took an entirely new direction than he’d followed as one-third of the songwriting team for Whiskey Scars. That band, featuring former Dixie Dirt frontwoman Kat Brock and local scene veterans Tom Pryor, Jamie Cook, and Matt Urmy, practiced a disheveled and sardonic version of classic folk and country. Sexton’s first solo album, Big Love, released in the summer of 2008, is an expansive, open-hearted folk-rock disc, disarming for its positive, upbeat vibes and the orchestrated harmonies of an eight-part backing vocal group known as the Big Love Community Choir.