Silver Moons

In their own words: Jessica Lynne

A recent visit to SeaTac International Airport brought two musical discoveries, different but equally welcome. The airport now has a store stocked to the rafters with new LPs and CDs, dedicated to Sub Pop Records, the record company that brought us Nirvana. More than any other label, Sub Pop symbolizes Seattle’s enduring commitment to independent popular music, making it a fitting, however astonishing, addition to the airport.

The city’s commitment to indie music came through still more tangibly in the airport’s bright south atrium where I stumbled onto a live performance by the singer and guitarist Jessica Lynne. No doubt about it, Seattle is a magnet for talent. Lynne, who won last year’s Texaco Country Showdown for Washington State, writes her own material and sings with an endearing southern twang—an adopted one, as it happens: she’s from Denmark. Seattle’s pull is strong indeed. When I greeted her between sets, here’s what she had to say.

“I grew up out in the country, in a different country. I grew up in Demark. That’s where I lived all my life until I moved to Seattle four years ago. My dad lives here, so that made it an easy choice, to have some family and some support. I happen to love it here, and I even wrote a song about it, ‘Calling Me Home.’ Before country, my inspiration was the Beach Boys. (My dad and I can agree on Kingston Trio and the Beach Boys. And John Denver, of course.)

“I think I was six years old when I wrote my first song. The first songs I ever played, on both my instruments, piano and guitar, were things that I wrote. I didn’t ever sit down and learn a song that someone else wrote. I just started writing. I was probably 10 when I performed my first finished song, which was a hit at my school. You could not get me off the stage! Then once when I was 12 and home with the flu, the TV was stuck by chance on this channel called CMT, Country Music Television. I’d listened to the classics—Jim Reeves, Patsy Cline—but this was fresh and new. They called it ‘new country’ in the ’90s, right? And Faith Hill’s ‘Wild One’ was number one, and I just loved that song, and I fell completely in love with that genre. And I have been ever since.

“But I did stop playing for 10 years, from age 18 to 28. I just stopped doing music. I got discouraged, like a lot of people do. Finally I just had to admit that I am not happy unless I do music. I also had to admit that country music was what I want to do, and there’s not a lot of country going on in Demark!

“City of Music started at SeaTac airport about a year and a half ago, funded by the Port of Seattle, and they’ve recently doubled the number of musicians. I’m here about 4 times a month. The best thing about playing at the airport is the exposure—you never know who’s gonna be here. I do love to sing in front of this many people. I like the challenge. I really like having to overstep boundaries to get people’s eye contact. Plus, the kids. The kids come out and they dance, and they don’t have all those inhibitions that we do. So they’ll just sit there, clapping. There was a little boy over here a minute ago, and every time I stopped he was like, ‘Yay!’—the first one—and then everyone else was like, ‘We better clap.'”

Mississippi In July – Jessica Lynne Live at the Columbia City Theater from Jessica Lynne on Vimeo.

30 August 2014

Whole Note: Music of 2013

Issue 24 is out! Most of the pages are devoted to my writeup of the very best songs from last year, 24 selections veering from jazz fusion to pop to traditional jazz to psychedelic rock and back again. Here’s the issue’s introductory essay.

Year after year, I keep having the sense that this is a great time for music. Could be it’s just ever-better access to music, resulting in more artists, songs, and albums of interest for any given listener. It’s easier than ever for artists to record and distribute music independently, which means more recorded music makes its way into the wild. A corresponding boost comes from online and mobile music services, which gained in both number and popularity last year. Whatever one’s tastes—bleeding-edge pop, avant-garde jazz, esoteric electronica, stoner metal—music services such as Pandora, Spotify, and Xbox Music make it easy to dive deep. At the same time, LP records, once regarded as artifacts of a bygone era, are in full production. New LPs, cleanly pressed on thick slabs of vinyl, provide premium listening on good hi-fi systems, and most come with MP3s for use on computers and phones. Meanwhile, websites like HDTracks, eClassical, HighResAudio (for outside the U.S.), and Neil Young’s soon-to-open Pono Music offer downloads of better than CD fidelity, a trend I hope will continue. An odd side effect of all this is that CDs, the dominant format for most of my lifelong listening, seem increasingly inessential.

Whatever the reasons, good and great new music seems to be everywhere. Under mounting pressure from that awareness, I spent much of last year heads down in older tunes, pouring foundations for a grand ranking of the top thousand rock songs of all time (stay tuned!). But new music, timely and fresh, kept jutting in and cranking me back to the present.

Mainstream pop in 2013 was a bumpy terrain canvassed by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Lorde, Daft Punk, Kanye West, Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry, Bruno Mars, Jay Z, Lady Gaga, Imagine Dragons, Justin Timberlake, Rihanna, and Sara Bareilles. Bareilles and Daft Punk hit closest to home, and I discuss both in the pages that follow. Less widely trumpeted but no less significant to my year were releases from Mary Fahl, KT Tunstall, Big Country (reformed with Mike Peters, lead singer from The Alarm), and Goldfrapp. The year was especially strong for jazz. Some songs led with compositional strength (Kenny Garrett), some with innovative arrangements (Dave Bennett, Joshua Redman), others with gripping grooves (Dave Holland, Etienne Charles). All had finesse and awesome chops. So here it is: the very best of what I heard in last year’s music.

(Reprinted from issue 24.)

17 April 2014

Is it a crime?

Re-watched a lot of the 1985 Live Aid concert over the weekend. Sade really stood out. She comes out in the heat of the day in front of tens of thousands of people pumped for Style Council and U2, and she and her band kill it with…smooth jazz? But kill it they do! Like too many other songs from that day, this one got left off the DVD.

26 March 2014