That song, "Be Me," is the calling card, and rightly so. It's a lean, driving slice of indie-pop that splits the difference between Bowie's theatrical detachment and Paul Simon's conversational ease, built around a chorus that refuses to loosen its grip once it's got you. It announces a songwriter unafraid of directness, which turns out to be the record's defining quality.

What makes this collection genuinely interesting isn't the hooks, though there are plenty. It's the range of what Jeremy is willing to write about. Grief sits next to Keynesian economics. Moral failure shares a tracklist with plastic-eating bacteria. The Romans straightening rivers turn up somewhere near the mechanics of heartbreak. It shouldn't cohere, and yet it does, because the voice steering the ship — curious, wry, politically alert, incapable of self-pity — never wavers from song to song. Jeremy calls his approach "joyous realism," a phrase that could easily curdle into marketing copy but earns its keep here: these are songs that stare at hard truths without flinching and without collapsing into misery either.

That range plays out across the six songs proper. "The Story of a Mistress" and "How to be Good" both suggest a writer more interested in moral complication than moral verdicts, while "Bowie on the Wall" wears its influence openly without ever slipping into pastiche — a nod rather than an impression. The title track, "A Well Worn Path," feels like the record's thesis statement in miniature, and closer "Bittersweet" earns its name, ending the side on exactly the kind of unresolved, clear-eyed note the whole project seems built around.

The record's method deserves a mention too, if only because it's handled with unusual honesty. Jeremy plays every guitar part and all of the fretless bass himself — an instrument he treats as a genuine voice rather than mere low-end filler, giving the six songs here a loose, unquantized pulse. The rest of the band, so to speak, is assembled from AI tools trained on his own voice: a workaround born of necessity rather than gimmickry, deployed to fill gaps a solo artist working outside any industry infrastructure simply couldn't fill otherwise. It's used as scaffolding, not spectacle, and the songs are never once at its mercy.

If there's a criticism to make, it's that six tracks is a tantalisingly short first taste of something pitched as a four-sided project — this is very much a table-setter, and it leaves you waiting on the next instalment rather than fully sated. But that's a minor complaint against a debut this generous, this literate, and this willing to say things most songwriters leave unsaid. Scenes from a Well Worn Path doesn't sound like someone's first outing. It sounds like someone who has simply, finally, decided to talk.