THEARC — The Town Hall Education Arts Recreation Campus — is not Madison Square Garden. It is not the Hammersmith Odeon or the Royal Festival Hall. It is a Southeast Washington community anchor, a building that exists specifically to serve people whom grander institutions routinely ignore. That Grey Jacks chose this venue, rather than somewhere with more obvious prestige, for his pre-release fan event tells you almost everything you need to know about his artistic priorities. The DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and the Levine School of Music co-sponsored the evening — institutions representing, between them, the city's formal artistic infrastructure and its commitment to music education across generations. The symbolism is not accidental. An album about what passes between generations, performed in a room built around the idea of community investment, in partnership with a music school that teaches children: the venue is itself an argument, and Jacks is sharp enough to know it.
The video captures a full-band performance, with the additional presence of what the press materials describe as an intergenerational orchestra — and this is where "With Who" as a live document transcends what any studio version, however beautifully produced, could achieve. The song is, at its core, a meditation on belonging across time: who we come from, who we are made by, the invisible filaments connecting one generation to the next. To perform it flanked by musicians of visibly different ages — Levine students alongside seasoned players — is to make the song's argument physically present in the room. The orchestra is not ornamentation. It is evidence.
Jacks himself performs with the contained intensity of someone who has been living inside this material for a long time and knows that the worst thing he could do is oversell it. His vocal is careful without being precious, emotionally available without tipping into the manipulative. He has clearly spent serious time thinking about how much a singer should give away, and how much withholding is itself a form of expression. The answer he arrives at is exact. The strings rise around him with the kind of swell that, in lesser hands, would feel theatrical; here, because the room is real and the audience visibly present, it simply feels true.
British audiences weaned on the pastoral emotionalism of Nick Drake, the narrative precision of Eliza Carthy, or the quiet devastation of John Martyn at his most exposed will find in Jacks a transatlantic cousin — someone working in a distinctly American idiom but with a songwriter's discipline that would be recognised and respected on this side of the Atlantic without a moment's hesitation. The Americana tag, which so often functions as a kind of critical holding pen for music that defies easier categorisation, barely contains what Jacks is doing. This is closer to folk music in its oldest, truest sense — the kind that carries community history in its melodic bones.
The audience at THEARC is audible in the video, and their silence during the song's more searching passages is worth noting. This is not the polite quiet of people waiting for a chorus they know. It is the quiet of people genuinely caught — held by something they did not quite expect to encounter on a February evening in Southeast Washington. When a room of strangers holds its breath together, the performer has done something that cannot be engineered in a recording studio.
That this video exists at all is something of a gift. Live documents of this intimacy and specificity are increasingly rare in an industry that has largely abandoned the idea that the space between a performer and an audience is sacred territory worth preserving. Jacks and his collaborators clearly disagree. They were right to film it, and right to release it.
"With Who" is not a song that announces itself loudly. It grows. It insists, quietly, on being heard again. And again. By the third or fourth listen — or viewing — you realise it has rearranged something small but permanent in the way you think about who you are and where you came from.
INTERgenerational is released April 17, 2026 on Antidote Sounds Records. On the evidence of this, clear your diary.