jennylee (Jenny Lee Lindberg of WarPaint)

Feeling. I believe that is at the core of Jenny Lee’s music and indeed at the core of who she is as an artist and a human. While it could be assumed that most of us moving in and out of our days are meant to be feeling the majority of the time, processing our surroundings through our hearts and souls, drinking in the nourishment and using the residuals to push things forward, this isn’t always the case. In fact there are many among us who admit to feeling very little, or more to the point, to being driven not by feeling but by function, by order, by catalogue or calendar, by station or status. Even within music and art as whole we find example after example of structure and formula and solutions for the fastest victory. Jenny Lee seems to buck all of that, and not as a direct act of protest, but instead as a natural way of being as innate to her as breathing. She is fluid, she is rhythmic, she is a dance trapped within an instrument, moving her way out into the universe like a river to the sea.

Having spent the past decade defining the groove that allows psychdream benders Warpaint the luxury to drift between genres and eras, Jenny Lee’s first attempt at solo life proves equally loose, open, and driven by the rhythm of the heart. Layered with overtones of darker pop and new wave classics, the album rides like a series of small poems, often sparse with verse, but continuously brimming with soul. Whether or not it was Lee’s intention to create a piece that feels as much as it declares, she has done so in classic style. Listening from start to finish there is a sense of channeling, of the type of motion that can only occur in the early hours of the morning or the latest hours of the night, that space between thinking and doing. There is an innocence in these tracks, as there is innocence in the drawings of our youth, a roughness, a rawness, a vulnerability but also a confidence the confidence of knowing there are no rules, the confidence of having traveled the world playing songs to the millions, and realizing you still have so much more to say.

Written slowly over the course of the past few years, Right On, is the culmination of a lifetime of collected ideas ghosts of relationships past, stories of reckless abandon, escape routes disguised as reasons to dance. Coproduced in Los Angeles by long time friend and collaborator Norm Block, a rhythm section in his own right, the stripped down openness of the instrumentation allows Jenny Lee’s haunting melodies to carry their weight as needed, sometimes rising to a powerful scream, and others whispering quietly into the fog. With the album’s release, and the promise of solo-touring, Lee is excited by the idea of having room to spread her wings as a front woman, not because she craves the spotlight but because putting down the bass will afford her a range of motion she might not otherwise have accessed both physically and spiritually. If the gravity of the songs in their recorded form is any indicator, audiences should be prepared for an awakening as much as a concert.

Jenny Lee has no intentions of ending her work with Warpaint any time soon, but with Right On, she has found new pieces of herself that will only serve to broaden and deepen her musical well. With this sonic growth, in turn comes a personal growth which will no doubt lead to richer songs, greater art, and truer feeling a wonderful cycle which we are all lucky enough to be a part of.