Jana Horn announces new album
JANA HORN ANNOUNCES NEW ALBUMĀ THE WINDOW IS THE DREAMĀ OUT 7 APRIL VIA NO QUARTER
SHARES LEAD SINGLE ‘AFTER ALL THIS TIME’
“Hornās debut album is a skeletal marvel”
The Guardian“
With the boiled-down quality of a good short story collection, [Optimism] is cryptic, bewildering and daringly simple”
Pitchfork
“Deceptively gentle songs […] they unfold like melodic dreams”
4/5 Mojo
“Made for uncertain times… funny, clever and elegant”
8/10 Uncut
Watch the visualiser for ‘After All This Time’ here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56jWjpOvFKs
BandcampĀ |Ā InstagramĀ |Ā Website
Today Glen Rose, Texas-born songwriterĀ Jana HornĀ announces her new album,Ā The Window Is The Dream, out 7 April viaĀ No Quarter, and presents lead single, ‘After All This Time’.Ā The Window Is The DreamĀ is a Rothko-esque colour field set to music, venturing even deeper into Hornās inner space than her stark, acclaimed debutĀ OptimismĀ (January 2022) which earned widespread praise from countless outlets includingĀ The Guardian,Ā Pitchfork,Ā Uncut,Ā Mojo,Ā The FADER,Ā NPRĀ andĀ StereogumĀ who deemed it “a truly classic debut”. “I wroteĀ OptimismĀ at a very transient time in my life, when I was in no place at once and everything was slipping through my hands like a wet fish”, Horn says.Ā The Window Is The Dream, however, “was written in one room, essentially. When you have nowhere to go, you go into memory, and memories of dreamsā¦ I was in a different headspace”.
‘After All This Time’ is a fever-dream filtered through Hornās signature sparse lens, and features cello arrangement byĀ Jared Samuel Elioseff. Elioseff recorded most ofĀ The Window Is The DreamĀ atĀ Pale Moon SessionsĀ in Cambridge, New York, with additional recording happening alongsideĀ Craig RossĀ atĀ Studio 4Ā in Austin, Texas. Other collaborators were pulled from Hornās days in the Austin music scene ā sometime-Bill-Callahan-drummerĀ Adam JonesĀ and experimental guitaristĀ Jonathan HorneĀ to name a few ā who provided a different kind of creativity during downtime. “They were making the studio at the time, so I was part of the process”, says Horn. “I would be tiling the bathroom floor with Sarah during the breaks, or helping Adam install the toilets”.
The Window Is The DreamĀ is an entry into a world very much Hornās own, where the words and the music only serve to showcase the inviting gaps in-between. The magic lies in feeling the space, in waiting to see what comes next. “Thereās this wonderful mystical quality about writing”, Horn says. “Itās always a surprise and a joy to uncover something that maybe was waiting to be unwrapped”, She clarifies, “I hope that Iām presenting things in such a way thatās not ambiguous, but abstracted, so that you enter in. Some people describe my lyrics as being not specific enough, but Iām not interested in presenting a diary. Iād like you to feel your way through it”.
From the desk of Jana Horn:
The Window Is The Dream began as a failed poem. I wrote it as I was waking up… āthe last thing I want in this breath of existence / is not to throw myself into it / as any bird might stop flying / when the window is the dream.ā I think the original line was ātoad breath.ā My classmates were nice about it, even the teacher.
I was taking a class on esoteric lit, a fiction workshop, a poetry class. And while the poem wasn’t quite… a poem… a song did rise from it, like smoke from a fire put-out. The song is called ‘The Dream’, which maybe the album is pointing toward. These recurring lines which depict the image of a bird hitting a window, though not out of oblivion, but because the bird knows something we don’t.
I think of a line from a favorite story of mine, ‘Car Crash While Hitchhiking’, in which a man is observing someone badly hurt, and about to go: And therefore I looked down into the great pity of a personās life on this earth. I donāt mean that we all end up dead, thatās not the great pity. I mean that he couldnāt tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldnāt tell him what was real.
I won’t bore you with more quotes… but perhaps my idea with this song, and album, was in part to help keep this broader, ongoing conversation in the air, like a beach ball.I wrote these songs in the thick of a writing program. I was reading all the time, sometimes five-hundred pages a week or more, there was no music on, for years maybe; my record player broke, the stereo in my car, my laptop was on its last speaker and then it started twitching. The feeling of those days was holding on, as though centripetal force alone was keeping everything going. Songs spilled. Days go by / they don’t have time. Even the walks I took were circular, around the cemetery and back.
– Jana Horn, January 2023
Photo credit: Ebru YildizHigh-res artwork is availableĀ here
Pre-orderĀ The Window Is The DreamĀ here:
https://janahorn.bandcamp.com/album/the-window-is-the-dream
Pre-order the 100 limited Rough Trade vinyl edition here:
https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/jana-horn/the-window-is-the-dream-2
The Window Is The DreamĀ tracklist:
1. Leaving Him
2. After All This Time
3. Days Go By
4. The Dream
5. Love In Return
6. Old Friend
7. Song For Eve
8. In Between
9. Energy Go
10. The Way It Is