John Michael Hersey - Quixote

​John Michael Hersey

Quixote
self-released; 2026

By Jamie Funk
​

John Michael Hersey has spent much of his career moving between songwriting, theater, and scholarship, but his familiarity with older American music runs especially deep. For years he served as musical director, guitarist, and second tenor for Speedo and the Cadillacs, an experience that provides useful context for Quixote, his twenty-second album. Framed as a roots-rock picaresque, the record loosely borrows from Don Quixote to follow a South Jersey musician who heads toward the city chasing fortune and fame, only to discover that the destination he imagined is not necessarily where the story leads.

The concept gives Quixote some structure, but Hersey rarely lets it overpower the songwriting. Rock, folk, blues, country, and pop are all worked into an album concerned with ambition, disappointment, persistence, and eventually love. The Don Quixote reference becomes less a literary exercise than a way of examining the distance between what someone expects from life and what actually happens.

“What Are You Looking For?” reminded me immediately of familiar singer-songwriter rock. Strummed chords, a steady 4/4 beat, and catchy vocal melodies give it a straightforward construction, but the simplicity works. “Aegean” pushes closer to classic rock and carries a noticeably more serious tone. “Pelham” heads in the opposite direction, openly embracing older musical conventions and moves that have been heard countless times before.

That backward-looking approach becomes increasingly clear as the album continues. “Who Knew?” has the feel of a ’70s ballad, while “A Walk in the Park” leans even further into the decade. Elsewhere, “One Cup of Coffee” brings traditional blues into the mix before Hersey returns to the sort of classic rock and singer-songwriter vocabulary that dominates much of the record. I heard traces of the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s throughout Quixote. It would be difficult to call any of this particularly modern, but that does not seem to be Hersey’s intention.

The songs are well written, a bit formulaic and melodically sturdy. Chord changes, arrangements, and stylistic turns often go where you expect them to go. But Quixote makes more sense when viewed as a homage to genres, eras, and songwriting traditions rather than an attempt to push them somewhere new.

​That is ultimately where the album works best. Hersey clearly understands this music and has spent decades around it. Quixote is built from recognizable materials without much interest in disrupting them. For listeners who still find comfort in classic rock, folk, blues, and older pop songwriting, that familiarity is less a limitation than the point.

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