Los Angeles-based songwriter Jenny O. has long used music as a way to examine different dimensions of the human experience and help people see the world in a new light. On 2017’s Peace & Information, she wrestled with personal struggles amid a world of suffocating violence and exploitation, her own pain amplified by the guilt of its relative smallness and the sense of powerlessness in the face of a larger picture of climate breakdown and geopolitical strife. “The trouble with being a hero,” as she sang on ‘People’, “you need a place to live / and good job with a ring to it.” Follow-up New Truth, released via Mama Bird Recording Co., continued the thread, its soothing retro tones belying the central conundrum still beating at its core. “Am I doing enough / for the tragedy I see?” asks closer ‘Seek Peace’, “when I can barely cope / with my own existence.”
This duality between individual and societal issues is what drives Jenny O.’s work, the former framed against the latter as thus acknowledged as component parts of the problems we all face. “People in power are just people,” she offers on Peace & Information. “And when you see it repeating / It comes down to you not to be that way.” The result is to view the personal and political not as juxtaposed phenomena but instead something more synergistic, inherently linked forces with real power over one another. So what at first appears to be stories of soured relationships told with relaxed guitar solos and blissful harmonies is actually something far deeper. A new perspective, one which allows us to see fine cracks in a seemingly unscalable wall of disempowerment, and begin to realise we might not be completely helpless after all.
Earlier this year Jenny O. unveiled ‘Prism’, the first single from an album due for release later this year which centred this vision more overtly. A slow, swirling jam which lures the listener into its folds, murmuring in their ear, convincing them of the power of love. “Baby where you going?” Jenny O. croons, “You should see / What my love can do.” A force capable of magnification and transformation, an agent of change. “Love is a prism,” as Jenny O. describes. “It amplifies or alters how we see and conduct ourselves. Through love, I was able to write everything else on the upcoming album, so it’s right that ‘Prism’. comes out first.”
My love for you
Is a prism for your electric art
Is a castle for your magical heart
Let me be your magnifier
And meet you higher
A reciprocal spirit!
Ahead of a Europe/UK tour with Strand of Oaks (see below for a full list of dates), Jenny O. has unveiled a brand new video for the track, edited by Elizabeth Weinberg who filmed it at George’s Lighting in Hollywood, California. Check it out below:
Prism is out now via Mama Bird Recording Co. and is available from all the usual places. Jenny O is about to head to Europe and the UK for a string of shows with Strand of Oaks, as well as appearing at the Manchester Psych Fest. Check out a full list of dates below:
Aug 16 – Utrecht, NL – TivoliVredenburg*
Aug 21 – Oslo, NO – Krosset*
Aug 23 – Gothenburg, SE – Pustervik*
Aug 24 – Stockholm, SE – Nalen Klub*
Aug 25 – Degerhamn, SE – Carlas Cafe*
Aug 26 – Lund, SE – Mejeriet*
Aug 27 – Copenhagen, DK – Loppen*
Aug 29 – Berlin, DE – Privatclub*
Sept 1 – Groningen, NL – Oosterpoort*
Sept 2 – Zwolle, NL – Hedon*
Sept 3 – Manchester, UK – Manchester Psych Fest
Sept 5 – Den Haag, NL – Paard*
Sept 7 – Leeds, UK – Brudenell Social Club*
Sept 8 – Bristol, UK – Exchange*
Sept 9 – Brighton, UK – The Prince Albert*
Sept 10 – London, UK – Lafayette*
* w/ Strand of Oaks
