Jana Horn announces new album
JANA HORN ANNOUNCES NEW ALBUM THE WINDOW IS THE DREAM OUT 7 APRIL VIA NO QUARTER
SHARES LEAD SINGLE ‘AFTER ALL THIS TIME’
“Horn’s 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
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Today Glen Rose, Texas-born songwriter Jana Horn announces her new album, The Window Is The Dream, out 7 April via No Quarter, and presents lead single, ‘After All This Time’. The Window Is The Dream is a Rothko-esque colour field set to music, venturing even deeper into Horn’s inner space than her stark, acclaimed debut Optimism (January 2022) which earned widespread praise from countless outlets including The Guardian, Pitchfork, Uncut, Mojo, The FADER, NPR and Stereogum who deemed it “a truly classic debut”. “I wrote Optimism 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. 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 dreams… I was in a different headspace”.
‘After All This Time’ is a fever-dream filtered through Horn’s signature sparse lens, and features cello arrangement by Jared Samuel Elioseff. Elioseff recorded most of The Window Is The Dream at Pale Moon Sessions in Cambridge, New York, with additional recording happening alongside Craig Ross at Studio 4 in Austin, Texas. Other collaborators were pulled from Horn’s days in the Austin music scene — sometime-Bill-Callahan-drummer Adam Jones and experimental guitarist Jonathan Horne to name a few — 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 Dream is an entry into a world very much Horn’s 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. “There’s this wonderful mystical quality about writing”, Horn says. “It’s always a surprise and a joy to uncover something that maybe was waiting to be unwrapped”, She clarifies, “I hope that I’m presenting things in such a way that’s not ambiguous, but abstracted, so that you enter in. Some people describe my lyrics as being not specific enough, but I’m not interested in presenting a diary. I’d 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… “the 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.” I think the original line was “toad breath.” 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 person’s life on this earth. I don’t mean that we all end up dead, that’s not the great pity. I mean that he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t 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 available here
Pre-order The Window Is The Dream 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 Dream 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