Photo Credit: Jeremy Bogen

Nine originals in five months. Costa Rica based folk singer-songwriter Jeremy Bogen is making up for lost time, and “Heart on My Sleeve” wears every scar proudly.

Jeremy Bogen used to paddle out twice a day, every day. Lately, the swell on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast has been rolling in without him, and he doesn’t mind one bit. The 41-year old folk singer-songwriter behind Leave the Bones has been chasing a different kind of wave.

After four decades of believing every great song had already been written, Bogen finally wrote one. Over the past five months, he has written nine. His newest, “Heart on My Sleeve,” is the most defiant thing he has ever put to tape.

“Songwriting feels like a swell,” he says. “You have to paddle out every day or you might miss it.”

Dylan in the Rain

Bogen was built for this long before he knew it. Born outside Chicago and raised in Minneapolis, he spent family road trips to his grandmother’s house in La Crosse, Wisconsin absorbing entire Arlo Guthrie albums, falling as hard for the rambling stories as the songs.

He saw Bob Dylan five times before his thirteenth birthday, including one Minnesota show where the sky turned green, a thunderstorm rolled in, and Dylan, a man famous for barely acknowledging his audience, simply announced that they would play in the rain.

His ear, though, was born in the family minivan, spinning a live Paul McCartney and Wings CD. It was the breakdown in “Band on the Run,” the moment everything drops away and a big, clean acoustic guitar rings out alone. That sound still shapes every arrangement he builds. Then there was John Prine.

“My dad would play John Prine songs for me and tell me about seeing him at tiny spots in Chicago, where he’d come out with a six pack and play till it was empty,” Bogen says. “He really made me fall in love not just with the music, but the culture and characters behind it.” An old soul from the start.

The Long Way Around

Then life took him elsewhere. Bogen went to the University of Montana to ski, until a professor who had marched with Dr. King turned him on to human rights history. He applied for a UN Refugee Agency internship on a whim, and an Australian recruiter plucked his application from a stack of thousands, partly because his surname sounded like Aussie slang she couldn’t resist. He left the U.S. at 22 and never really moved back, spending roughly fifteen years between Geneva and Chamonix telling refugees’ stories.

He played music the whole way, spending nine years perfecting a haunting, open C tuned arrangement of Springsteen’s “I’m On Fire” with the melody carried on harmonica. But writing his own material? Every attempt got shelved.

“The thing that motivates me is earning the privilege to be called a songwriter and a folk musician,” he says. He didn’t feel he had earned it yet. “I just needed to live longer.”

The Dam Breaks

What finally cracked him open was love. “Pinch Me Darlin,” the first Leave the Bones original, tells the story of the rainy afternoon his wife finally came over for a bottle of wine and the Costa Rica escape plan they hatched together. It sprawled into a five verse ballad. “It’s the first time I was really honest with myself and put it down on paper,” Bogen says. Even his most contrarian friend, former Freeride World Tour champion Drew Tabke, heard it and told him flatly that it was a real song.

Marrying into a family of painters, architects, and thinkers (her grandfather once traded letters with Sigmund Freud) gave him another push. “I’m starting to leave things behind,” he realized. That became the reason to release anything at all. After that, the songs kept coming. “Fool’s Gold,” his most streamed track, took about fifteen minutes in his parents’ basement.

“Heart on My Sleeve”: Swagger at the Crossroads

If “Pinch Me Darlin” was Bogen opening his heart, “Heart on My Sleeve” dares you to take a swing at it. The song reaches for the oldest myth in American roots music, the crossroads, where bargains get struck in the dark. Bogen tells you to shake hands with the devil, and to make sure there’s an ace up your sleeve when you do. Then the hook lands like a challenge thrown across a bar: “Before you take a shot at me / Take a good look at the heart on my sleeve.”

“For me, this song has an audience of one,” Bogen says. “But I hope it will give people some swagger and defiance against whatever is trying to get them down.”

It opens on rainy nights that aren’t what they used to be, a sly nod back to the rainy afternoon that started everything, only now the romance has hardened into resolve. Scars tell the story. The crossroads live inside him.

Then comes the moment Bogen can’t stop talking about. In the final verse, the bed drops out, leaving just his voice and his old Telecaster. He sings with a little more emotion, reaching back to his roots from the end of the road: his soul is defined by every place and friend from this journey. It’s the crack in his voice and the note that connects. Writing the line mattered. Expressing it right mattered more. It’s the “Band on the Run” breakdown all over again, except now he’s the one building it. “That’s the shit that makes me love doing this,” he says.

That Telecaster carries a buzz he could never fix after years of ungrounded venues in France. When a producer offered to remaster one of his tracks, she sent it back buzzing even louder. He loved it. The textures owe a debt to his binges on Lord Huron, The War on Drugs, and Ryan Adams, while the raspy, unvarnished delivery puts him in the company of Ryan Bingham, Ben Harper, and Ray LaMontagne. One playlist curator once told him she found his vocal performance “disturbing.” Bogen laughed it off. The voice is the point.

Renewed Purpose

These days Bogen and his wife run a small bed and breakfast, and Leave the Bones plays exactly one local spot, a brewery up in the hills. At a recent gig, a Brooklyn regular who always complains about the sound asked what had changed. Bogen told him he was playing with renewed purpose. For him, performing live feels like steep skiing or dropping into a big wave: you trust your ability and commit.

He recently signed with managers Dustin and Althea, a leap of faith he calls one of the most significant things that has ever happened to him. “That’s someone showing belief in you,” he says, “when you’re essentially wearing your soul on your sleeve.” The title of his newest single suddenly makes perfect sense.

Next up is a Jam in the Van performance on November 12, with plans forming to take the show on the road. The catalog keeps growing too: the Fool’s Gold EP, a remastered “Pinch Me Darlin” drawing algorithmic radio attention, his “I’m On Fire” cover, and “Darker Still,” released in late August. Down the line he wants to write songs about people who inspire him, like his wife’s parents, who once rode horseback from Buenos Aires to Patagonia to buy a farm.

Ask what he wants listeners to take from all of it, and he doesn’t hesitate. Pack the bag. Get out of your comfort zone. Walk through every door that opens. He walked through his at 40. Nine songs later, the swell is still coming in.

“Heart on My Sleeve” is out now, and the full Leave the Bones catalog is streaming now on all platforms.





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