On “Mr. Know It All“, the loudest person in the room may have the least to teach us. That thought gives Jack Raymond’s second album its bite.

This Australian folk, roots and blues album review puts people at its centre. They carry family stories, dodge hard truths and live with choices that arrived before them.

Raymond gives no heroic status to the title figure. Instead, he tests the gap between the person on the street and the person in the penthouse.

Straight away, the title turns certainty into a target.

Raymond’s earlier album, The Long Story Short, came while he was still learning the studio. This time, he and producer Ryan Tracey let the songs grow.

Then they spent three weeks at Scribble Gum Farm on the Sunshine Coast taking them apart. The method matches the album’s restless thinking.

Nothing here asks the listener to accept a neat moral. Instead, the record circles questions about choice, inheritance, care and habits people keep when change feels risky.

It suits listeners drawn to songwriter-led folk and blues that leaves space for doubt.

The detail around the record gives it heft. Electric guitars meet acoustic instruments, pads and brief flourishes across Raymond’s folk and blues foundation.

Tracey produced and engineered the album, while JB Paterson took those roles on “Dancing in Glory.” Angus Woodhead mixed at Glasshouse Studios, and Paul Blakey mastered at 12th & Vine Post.

Those credits point to a considered frame for stories that need air around them. Rather than a rush of ideas, the arrangement promises movement, weight and small turns of colour.

Raymond locates big questions in scenes that feel lived in. “Hollow Trees” returns to his High Country childhood, where Paulownia trees collapsed as his parents’ marriage did.

Its central image has the force of a theatre set, simple then loaded with changing weather. “Prisoner” started with a friend’s addiction and later brought Raymond’s own experience into focus.

That shift matters because it moves the song away from easy sympathy and toward recognition.

Elsewhere, “Ships in the Night” deals with a relationship shaped by two different working lives and one shared future. “Break the Mould” resists autopilot.

“Carpe Diem” asks people to pause the chase for the next thing. There is an apt link to the advice-heavy scroll culture of daily life, where each choice can look like a personal failing or a self-improvement task.

Raymond’s writing cuts through that pressure by staying with actual people, their limits and their hope of doing things differently.

“Dancing in Glory” questions beliefs passed down through generations, and “Run Yandina Run” considers difficult history held in Australian ground.

These songs keep the album from settling into private reflection alone. They connect home life to wider structures of belief and memory, while the title character keeps prodding at imbalance.

Raymond spent the year before the release touring from the Kimberley to Kings Canyon and across Australia. That route included regional towns, community halls, folk festivals and listening rooms, where stories must work without distraction.

The launch shows put him with Tracey and Georgia Scarlett in Brisbane. At Mapleton and Noosa, he appeared with Tracey and Daryl James.

The album reaches beyond that stage schedule. It offers new music listeners an entry point into Raymond’s Mountain Roots approach.

There, folk storytelling meets blues grit and questions that do not settle quickly. Its forward motion lies in a refusal to talk down to its characters.

Raymond has built a record ready for listeners who want a sharper question after the last chord fades.