Jenny Van West Interview
Doug Burke:
Welcome to Back Story Song. I'm your host, Doug Burke and today we're here with Jenny Van West. Jenny Van West is an Americana songwriter out of Portland, Maine. She's the winner of the Maine Songwriters Association contest and her album, Happiness to Burn was a finalist in 2018. Happiness to Burn reached number seven on the Euro Americana Charts, where it stayed for over three months.
A leader in the Maine songwriting and performance community, she is the founder of the Maine Immigrant Musical Instrument Project, the International Open Mic at the rapidly growing hipster, Portland, Mayo Street Arts festival and the Women's Singer-Songwriter-Composer Showcase in Maine. Her crystalline voice and melodic songwriting had been paired with the world-class production of Los Angeles' Shane Alexander and combined with some top-notch Los Angeles session musicians who've worked with the likes of Lukas Nelson, Jackson Browne, Shooter Jennings, Jacob Dylan, and others, all to create Happiness to Burn. (singing).
Welcome to Back Story Song. We're here with Jenny Van West to talk about some songs from her latest album, Happiness to Burn. Jenny.
Jenny Van West:
Hello, how's it going Doug?
Doug Burke:
Great. Thanks for being here. Would you like to start by talking about the title track, Happiness to Burn?
Jenny Van West:
Yeah, absolutely. About five years ago, I was granted an amazing opportunity that blossomed into a major change in my own life here in Portland and that was, I started meeting immigrants from Africa and we have a lot of them here. Last five or seven or eight years we've had many, many people coming here from Congo-Brazzaville, Democratic Republic of Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, Burundi, Rwanda, Gabon, Burkina Faso, but many, many people from DRC, Rwanda, Burundi, Congo-Brazzaville, and... oh, and Angola. Let's not forget Angola. As this process unfolded, I started to get involved with getting people situated in apartments, helping with French translation because I speak French, and just learning a lot about the process of immigration as an asylum seeker. Most of the African immigrants in Maine are in an asylum process or were in an asylum process. We also have people here from the green card lottery, et cetera. Long story short, I had an opportunity to start really observing the way Americans just are and I didn't plan this. It just happened. I was welcomed to the people's homes. I would sit on people's floors in sketchy apartment buildings, being welcomed, being fed, and just allowing myself to get caught up in these truly amazing and remarkable people that have relocated to Maine. What I started to notice was that... We started to have gatherings at our house. This was like one of the first things I thought about, was like, I just want to get to know people and let's all get together and play music. We did that. I started inviting people over to play music. I brought together people from countries that have historic problems with each other. Like, I didn't even know I was doing that. Like we just all were learning from each other, eating together, playing music. What I started to notice was that my African friends would come over to the house. They would show up in their best shoes and basically dressed in their Sunday best and they could relax for like three or four hours and do nothing but stay in the good stuff. Like the laughter and the, how's the family, singing songs. There was just such an overwhelming positivity and it was my American friends and sometimes even myself that after about 45 minutes would start to need to talk about bad news that happened to somebody else, like totally unrelated. Oh, did you see this in the news? Oh, did you hear happened in Scarborough? And I was like, what is going on? Like this is just weird to me. It was so the opposite of the way I had thought people deal with either relative comfort or relative difficulty. I was looking at this tendency of my American friends and myself included to have to just bring up bad news at a certain point. Like just can't stay in that good restorative space that you can have when you're with your friends. It's not really a judgment so much as it's an observation and I was like it's... like we got happiness to burn. These are people who have an education. These are people who haven't experienced tremendous difficulties in their life compared to my friends who were coming from war zones or from situations where there was horrible oppression going on, major human rights violations and stuff like that, and I'm like, "What the heck's going on?" That was the phrase that came to mind. It's like we got happiness to burn. I started to write that song and of course like the first iterations of that song were this like gut wrenching, soul pouring out, depressing interpretations, kind of critical. I was like this is not going anywhere. One of the things I love to do with songs, especially if I'm hitting some sort of creative little log jam or something in a song, lift the song out of whatever environment I've put it in. Let's say I've gone the first place that occurs to me with that song which ended up somewhere very depressing, nothing against depressing songs. I'm all about them, but I was like this isn't working. I was like, let's throw this into a pretty standard swing progression and write that song, and what I ended up writing was, oh, here's the song. This is about being in that place and allowing oneself to rest in that very restorative place when the good times are rolling and just allowing that to feed us and store up some goodness because the other stuff's coming. Life is that way. It's not this constantly good thing or constantly bad thing. If we're blessed with a relatively good life. There are still ups and downs, but how do we stay in that restorative space?
Doug Burke:
Well, I have to say it was not what I expected from you when I first played it, because it is this big band traditional jazz swing, great American songbook kind of sound.
Jenny Van West:
Thank you.
Doug Burke:
And I was like, wow. Does it start with a ukuleles and a tinkling piano? The intro is-
Jenny Van West:
Actually that's a mandolin.
Doug Burke:
A mandolin?
Jenny Van West:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
Okay. Sorry. Must have misheard it.
Jenny Van West:
Yeah. It's a mandolin. When we were producing that song, that whole album was produced in Los Angeles by Shane Alexander, who's a fantastic singer, song writer and producer. We didn't know it was going to be the first track on the record. I remember hearing one of the iterations of that song with Mike on mandolin just on his own. At first I was like, I don't know if this works for me, and then I was like, wait a second. This is what it's really all about. It's really all about being with people. I say this a lot when I'm playing shows. It's about being with people. Music is about the people. The music has got to be excellent, but it's really about the people and it's about how we connect with each other, how we connect with ourselves, and so that feeling of just like sitting in front of somebody, I'm so grateful that my record starts that way. Just being in the room, that up close and personal kind of a feeling.
Doug Burke:
I really like how it's the whole first verse that goes through and then the bass comes in in the second verse with these whole notes and it's just like complimentary thing dropping in the song.
Jenny Van West:
Yeah, and I'd love to say a little bit about the base on that and on the record in general. That's Ted Russell Kamp. When he's touring, he's everywhere. You look at his Instagram every week he's in a new place. He plays with Shooter Jennings. He's been in his band for a very long time. Basically there wasn't a note out of place from Ted on that record. It was such an incredible gift that he agreed to be on the record and he brought this depth of musicianship. I mean, every single person on that record did this, but Ted being the bass player, being the one that's in conjunction with Austin Beede on the drums holding down and grounding that music, it was just an incredible gift for me to have that.
Doug Burke:
I often talk about space in songs and this song has like this beautiful space where everybody stops, where you say the title of the song and the title of the album, Happiness to Burn in the chorus, we'll have happiness and then everybody stops and you just get to sing alone and I just love that.
Jenny Van West:
The session that I did in LA in 2017 to make that record and then there were performances that were added during the month after the week I was there. The setup was engineered by Shane and by our mixing engineer, Brian Yaskulka who is one of the American geniuses of audio mixing and also just a lovely man. I think they spent a lot of time up at Brian's mixing this record. I don't know. It's interesting to talk about it because I haven't talked about this aspect of the experience, the journey that I've had with this album in a while. I appreciate you bringing these things up and listening so carefully and noticing these things, because this is the genius of Brian and Shane in the mixing room and also of Hans DeKline who mastered it.
Doug Burke:
And from there you go into this really beautiful piano interlude. It's just...
Jenny Van West:
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for the love of the composition, the piano, all the keyboards, all the keys of any kind on this record. I think almost all of them were Carl Byron. He's a LA musician. Again, extraordinarily busy man and you know when it's hard to get people, that you're onto something. When you come across really fine musicians who have all kinds of time, except for right now, all bets are off. Right? I'm also been just incredibly grateful to have his presence on that record. I mean... I know I sound like I'm just saluting over and over and over again the names of these people, but as I'm bringing it back into focus right now talking to you, especially right now when everything's ground to a halt just to realize that that happened and that it was supposed to happen again. Actually I was supposed to be out there a couple of weeks ago making another record, which obviously didn't happen. Being grateful for having time to reflect right now in this kind of a way. I know I'm moving around on topics, but it comes back to this, having time to reflect and say, "Wow I made this incredible record with these guys." And we did that and we're going to do it again when things relax a little bit. It's going to happen again.
Doug Burke:
It's good that you remind us that we have happiness to burn. That our African immigrant friends in Portland are able to teach us something that we shouldn't take for granted.
Jenny Van West:
Oh, most definitely. Most definitely. Touching back on that topic, I just want to say that during the last five years I have been learning lessons... I mean, I have an awesome family right now. I have an incredible extended family which has been a huge part of the support for my music career, but there's always more lessons to learn and the lessons that I've learned from my immigrant friends from all over, because they're not just African immigrants in Maine. We've got a lot of people from the Middle East, Syria, Iraq, Iran. What I've learned from these friends of mine are lessons about the basics. It's about family. What is family? What does family do for each other? What does that really mean? What does it mean when somebody crosses that cultural boundary and just absorbs you into their family? I have people who call me grandma. I have people call me auntie. I have tons of people who call me their sister.
Doug Burke:
Which do you like best?
Jenny Van West:
Well, I think grandma's a pretty interesting one considering that I'm not quite there yet, but...
Doug Burke:
You're not a grandma yet. Is that insulting or do you... is it a term of endearment?
Jenny Van West:
No, not at all. No, no, no. This is what I've extrapolated. This is what I've learned from people. When you leave a culture that has centuries of family structure, connection, tribal connection, even people who live in big cities, feel these tribal connections very powerfully. It's another layer of being human that in the United States a lot of us don't have that sense of being part of a tribe, like actually being part of the tribe. There's a whole lot of reasons for that but one thing I've discovered is that when people are rebuilding their lives, especially if they come as a family group, there are positions in that family that are vacant. If you're lucky enough to have a grandma or three that you're able to bring into your family, and that is the position of the greatest honor. I mean, it's a huge honor to be called grandma in someone's family.
Doug Burke:
Be called nana or papa in the vernacular.
Jenny Van West:
Yeah. Oh, papa. Yeah exactly like... so for instance, I realize we're straying from the music a little bit, but this has infused my sense of what it means to be a musician so much that I'm glad we're talking about it, because that sense of belonging, coming back to that sensation of being a part of something and what that really means and how do we create that for each other most of all. How do we create that sense of being a part of something where we're not necessarily all on the same page, but we're enough on the same page that we can agree on certain things like I'm hungry, let's eat. I'm lonely, let's get together. Our family's doing all right so we're going to hang homemade donuts on your door every couple of weeks. That happens to us. We get beignet from one family every couple of weeks and that's their way. That's their cultural way. This is the family in which I get called grandma. That's their way of saying, we're cool, we got enough to eat, we love you. Everything's cool at our house. There's a lot of these kinds of communication things, which is great. When I see beignet on my door, first of all, it's always incredibly humbling because I'm like, I can't believe I have people in my life who do this on a regular basis. This is family. My family of origin is 600 miles away or more and there's people here. I got people here who are letting me know they're all right and they're letting me know that if I'm not all right, they're going to be there for me. We all need that.
Doug Burke:
That's a tasty thank you.
Jenny Van West:
That is a tasty thank you. Yeah. You like homemade beignet? Come to my house.
Doug Burke:
This kind of thing leads into one of the next songs you wanted to talk about, which is, Live in a New Way, which is really kind of a pop song.
Jenny Van West:
This one was written around the same time as Happiness to Burn in 2015. What was on my mind, same backdrop that I'm describing. You meet one person from Congo. You're going to meet a hundred people from Congo because these are very social people. I was meeting all these people, all these new people to me. One of the precursors to that moment that enabled that moment to happen was that there was a huge tragedy in my home state and that was a young man named Freddie Gray. Died in the back of a police van in Baltimore. It was the year of Ferguson and it was a year of other cities having major... mostly peaceful protests against police violence towards African American citizens. Having come from an old Maryland family, one branch of my family's old Maryland family and they were plantation owners in the 1600s. They settled, so-called settled a thousand acres of the Eastern Shore of Maryland and was a speaker of the house, the Maryland House of Representatives, bankers and slaveholders. They were European settlers who owned slaves and this went for 250 years. I spent time thinking about that and contemplating that and wondering about that. I think for sure, like I went through the whole like white guilt thing and stuff like that, but I had really reached... I think this other thing for me, which was allowing that piece of my history to be there and recognizing that it's very, very powerful and that I owe a lot to the families of these people who are enslaved by my family. Like and just recognizing that and just understanding that a little better and seeing the privilege in that. Freddie Gray had died, I started meeting people from Congo and other Sub-Saharan African countries, but I guess the death of Freddie Gray really hit hard because my family's from Maryland. When I saw the protests in the news, it finally got personal for me. I was like, I'm recognizing that there are people in the streets right now after all these centuries still asking for the basic right of safety and due process and I am possibly related to some of them. I don't know why it took that and I regret that it took that, but at the same time it did make an impact. The Live in a New Way for me was really about, we got to shift, we got to make a shift and we have to do it in our own minds and we also obviously have to do it through policy and we have to do it through enforcement and so forth but if we don't change the way we think and really give ourselves an opportunity to look inside our minds and see how we are thinking, because that is the basis of our life. If I allow myself to do this, change is possible. Change is possible, and really allowing ourselves to see some uncomfortable truths about what's in there. I think those are possibly the most uncomfortable truths in my life. That's a very privileged position to be in. If the most uncomfortable truths about my life is the stuff that's going on in my own head, then that's a position of privilege but it's also a position of being able to make changes. I started writing that song and guess what? It was really depressing and it was really like, ugh and so I was like, okay, okay, change up, change up, change up. We've got to get in the shallow end of the pool for this one. I would like this song to be one of those songs that people rock out to, it's party time, let's get together. Let's have a great time, and then 25 years later after this became your favorite song, you actually listen to the words and hear what it's saying and take it on a deeper level.
Doug Burke:
Especially hearing you talk about it, one of the things I ask on Back Story Song is I love lyrics that aren't words. In this song, the chorus is not really a word. Like I particularly like Bruce Springsteen screams on his first four albums. He screams in all sorts of different ways. I always ask the artists, did you actually like write that? Did you just sing that? Did it just come to you? You use the word whoa here, which usually means hold the horses. It's like a term you use when you're riding. Whoa, Nelly, that kind of thing and you use that here and maybe that word has more meaning, but it's like a whole line here.
Jenny Van West:
Yeah. It's great. You're listening to these songs more carefully than I think I have. I really appreciate that.
Doug Burke:
My God.
Jenny Van West:
I know. I really appreciate that about you, and listening to your interviews and it's... I appreciate that very much about you, Doug. One of the jokes we have around the house is you got to have enough nothing in your weekend. You got to have enough nothing in your summer. It's kind of a joke, but it's true. You got to have enough nothing in a song as well. I think that's actually a really common rookie mistake that we all make, is we try and cram too much into a song and especially when... with songs as with any kind of artistic presentation or even like advertising business presentation, you've got about three seconds max. It's probably half that these days, but you got about three seconds max to really get someone's attention. If they're going to walk away with one thing stuck in their head, it's got to float on a bed of nothing a little bit. There's got to be some air around it. It's got to be like you were saying in Happiness to Burn, the way it's arranged. You hit pause and there's the hook. In Live in a New Way I think also, yeah, it's like, I didn't really think about it but you're right. I mean, it's like, okay, whoa. It's not a full stop. It's like, let's just ring the ambient anxiety down a little bit or the intensity or whatever's going on for people. The anger that this, that that, and this song is really written to other white people. I'm just going to say that. Like I don't really talk about that very much.
Doug Burke:
This is a message to white people.
Jenny Van West:
It's absolutely... it's a white person, whitesplaining, a little basic lesson about human dignity and respecting our neighbors. I never want to come across as like preaching because I'm not a preacher. I'm not that person. I try not to be that person. I really, really powerfully believe in our ability to change if we are met where we are by right the person, the right word, the right teacher, the right whatever, and I think some people learn better if they get hit with a two-by-four metaphorically speaking. Sometimes in reality I suppose, but like metaphorically speaking I think we all have to have some of that, but I think also that there are opportunities in the middle of shallow end of the pool, light vibe, rocking out, chilling out, like to get a pretty deep message into our bones. Like that potential exists. If somebody comes to me with unsolicited advice, I can tell you that the response that they get from me is not very good. I'm working on it, but I don't do unsolicited advice very well. I endeavor not to give it unless I see a serious problem with something, but it's like, I do understand how sensitive people are. How sensitive white people like me are to the topic of racism and recognizing that like this stuff is kind of hard wired into us. That's what happens after centuries. Stuff gets hardwired in and so how do we wiggle that tooth and get it out of there, how do we very skillfully help each other overcome stuff that's entrenched? I mean, that's a huge question to put in a pop song, but I'm a great believer in like you get more flies with honey than you do with anything else, but also I don't go around hitting people over the head with my records. I think my favorite music to listen to and absorb these days is the lighter stuff. I'm talking like lighter in the sense of, for instance, Frankie Please by Rodney Crowell, which is one of my favorite songs ever. The topic is light and the writing is absolutely flawless and it doesn't carry any kind of deeper message, the way we're talking about.
Doug Burke:
This is a much deeper song than I realized. This comes from a much deeper place than I expected. I was reading and studying, you have a half chorus the first time you do the chorus and then you do the full chorus after two more verses. What I noticed was, which maybe you didn't notice when you're doing it, but you do the second whoa in an octave lower and it grabs you. You know what I'm talking about in the song?
Jenny Van West:
Yeah, I do. With the things you're bringing up right now I want to give a massive shout out to Shane Alexander who produced this record. As anybody who's had a world-class producer make their record knows the decisions that get made in the mixing room as well as the decisions that get made for collecting vocal takes, some of these songs only had a couple takes, but others we were... I was in the vocal booth a few times to do some different things. We had done a lot of preproduction arranging on things, and I'm trying to remember like where that particular decision came in, but it was definitely conscious and I appreciate you noticing that because this was the work that Shane and I did together beforehand. This was sensibility that he was bringing to the recording takes and then the decisions that got made in the mixing room, nothing's out of place. This is one of the things that has been such a gift to me as an artist, is to have a record with nothing out of place. Everything came under scrutiny.
Doug Burke:
How do you know when a song is done?
Jenny Van West:
Like in the writing of it or the producing of it, or what's your...
Doug Burke:
The whole process. A lot of people have to play it in front of people and then see the audience's reaction, and every song is different. They're like children. Sometimes you write it in three minutes and it's done and it's perfect and that's... it doesn't need to change a thing and then sometimes you have to work on them over five and seven and 10 years. How do you know when a song is done or when do you think you know a song is done?
Jenny Van West:
I'm going to approach it I think from the writing aspect. Like I'm sitting here looking at these curtains that I made. I've made all the curtains in my house. I can sew a straight line. What can I say? But it's like you make the curtains and the hem's out. You just haven't done the bottom hem yet. It's like, there's a similar moment in songwriting for me where I recognize that I've reached the natural conclusion of my part of the process and now it's time to bring it to somebody who knows more and I've been blessed with several mentors. I guess, and having a really reliable mentor who won't mess around with you, won't waste your time too much but also knows how to respond and give some feedback without shutting down the basic goodness of the song or the basic heart of the artist. Those people are worth their weight in gold and I've had several of them. One has been Ed DesJardins who I mentioned earlier up in Readfield. He brought me through that process a lot and was that sounding board for me that better... much better songwriter. I had tons to learn from him. I trusted him and he knew how to be like pointed but gentle with feedback, but what is that moment or what does that really mean? I think there's a certain type of just being stuck that comes from me when a song is just about ready to bring to that next part of the process, the arranging process or the feedback process, or that developmental edit. What I try to do when I'm writing, I try... well, there's a couple of things I've learned to do. One is to keep my creative door open all the time and just allow the ideas to come anytime of day or night. I'm not an obsessive sleepless kind of a worker. Some people work that way. I try and sleep every night.
Doug Burke:
You sleep well.
Jenny Van West:
Sometimes. Lately it's been up and down. I try and keep that creative door open. This is a tough one. This is a tough one, because like songs have their own personalities too, but there are some things about craft that I think I can address. There's the wuwu aspect and then there's the craft aspect. The craft being the basic arranging, basic message, the filing away at lines that are not quite done, marking lines for replacement, these kinds of things. Songs can get 90% done and still have quite a bit of like masking tape on them, for lack of a better way to put it. I like to leave a certain amount of that. It's like pulling... I'm a very visual person as you can see. It's like pulling the stickers off the window when you're done with the remodel, that kind of thing. I like to leave some of that stuff there so that it can be more than I can come up with by myself. Like when I take it to the studio, we have a solid arrangement. We have... it's been through some kind of pre production refining. If I'm going to come down to a feeling or a sense of like when a song is done, there's nothing in it that bothers me. I know that sounds like a bargain basement kind of way of being done. There's no-
Doug Burke:
You're no longer bothered.
Jenny Van West:
I'm no longer bothered by anything. This could be single words. This could be lines. Those could be arrangement related. Those could be...
Doug Burke:
How the audience reacts when you play it.
Jenny Van West:
How the audience reacts or even more so, how I feel putting that out there in front of them. It's not a fully reliable thing because anybody who's like hammered away at any craft of any sort for a long time knows what it feels like to go too far with something. This is also a rookie mistake that people have to kind of learn the hard way most of the time, I think is when to stop. Many other artists have said it better than I over the course of centuries. Of like knowing when to back away. That's really what it is for me. These days I try and keep the creative door open and I try and keep a fairly light grip on things. I keep a light grip on every word, every line, every creative decision that goes into making that song so that I don't create what people call darlings. They say kill your darlings. Well, I don't believe you have to kill every single darling in your song. Right? I take issue a little bit with that whole phrase but at the same time it has a lot of ton of merit.
Doug Burke:
Sometimes darlings are darling. They're darling and it's okay to be darling.
Jenny Van West:
There's a time and a place to be darling. The song Happiness to Burn is kind of darling, but it's because it's in a wheelhouse that's got some of that sort of shine to it. I think keeping a light hold on whatever I'm creating is essential for pursuing excellence because it allows me to get under the hood and tear out what's not working and toss it in the heap for the next song or put it in the trash or the burn pile or whatever, it's like... and to be a little less attached, I think is really, really helpful. (singing).
Doug Burke:
One of the things I love about the album Happiness to Burn is how every song kind of has a different intro that's unique. In the song Never Alone you start with a really beautiful acoustic guitar intro and it's kind of melancholy.
Jenny Van West:
Yeah. In talking with you I realized how much of this album I owe to my immigrant friends here in Portland, but this song was written for a friend of mine from Southeast Congo who at the time was separated from his family. He was just one of so many people I had met, especially younger men, young adults, men under the age of 30 who have left their families behind and this song... I'm actually seriously thinking about writing the parody version for this time of stay at home orders and quarantine and so forth because some of us are never alone right now.
Doug Burke:
And you like to be alone.
Jenny Van West:
I mean, I kind of like to be alone, or people are like living alone and they'd really love to be around people. There are these sort of environmental extremes around the social contact that people are dealing with right now, but this song I've had the opportunity just through invitations and taking them of going to African gospel concerts here in Maine and seeing how people gather and enjoy life and music and everything together. One of the lessons, the big lessons that I've been able to be privy to is about how does faith function as an anchor for people and a stabilizing force. That could be faith and just about anything, but the object of your faith, faith is a natural process of the mind. That's my belief anyway, to have faith in something, whether it's money or your family or the earth or you have a religious belief. Faith can be this connector when the bottom falls out from one time to the next to like get through. Again, going back to Lake my observations of being like, how does a person outside the realm of their country, their culture, their home languages, everything familiar, everything familiar, dominant skin tones, everything different. How does that person survive first of all, and how do they move forward with their life, with what are potentially the biggest challenge anybody faces on earth of relocating under duress without years of preparation, learning a new language, learning cultural interactions. How do you do that? I wanted to create this song, first of all, with plenty of room for vocal harmony. I didn't want it to be preachy. I wanted it to be relatable and this song has been incredibly helpful to me when I'm traveling, when I'm missing my family and missing my home world, is fantastic as it is and as wonderful as to travel and play music in other places. There's that very real thing of being lonely and missing home. Some of my favorite songs in history like for instance, like Stand by Me was written as a gospel song and it reached basically a global audience by just that simple shift of taking the specifics of the faith out of the song, which I realized some people might object to. On the other hand, it did allow that song to become this global force. I've always been fascinated with the challenge of writing something that's got that gospel vibe because I grew up listening to bluegrass music too, that bluegrass gospel is deep in my musical bones. I wanted to create something that would be relatable, that would somehow embody some of those lessons that I was absorbing from friends from very different backgrounds. I definitely felt like this song had a religious feel. Certainly the theme of having faith is a religious theme no matter what your religion is, I believe in some ways. Maybe there's some faithless religions but most have the concept of faith in them. You don't mention God in this but I was feeling like it was like you're going to see him again. It was almost like... Christians would say... that him should have a H in that line, but it's not in this song. It's a h. The only time you actually sort of have reference to classic Christian is the notion of a couple of angels and a destiny in the last part of this song. It's kind of universal in that sense. Yeah. Thank you so much for picking up on all them. You're spot on and I really appreciate so much your close listening, because what I wanted to create was a song that could be listened to on multiple levels, because I think the more levels of interpretation that we're able to offer people as listeners, the more likely we are to reach people in some way, shape or form that they need. If I were to identify that person, we could talk about it as specifically his story, right? I'm telling someone else's story in the first person, right? Then there's the, if someone wants to hear this as a personal song coming from me, they could hear that or they could sing it and hear it as a personal song coming from their own selves and how does that relate to their own lives, and then there's the if I get another invitation, I've had them before of like showing up for some big African gospel weekend. Even though I'm not an evangelical Christian, I get invited to these things sometimes and I am like, okay, let's go, let's see what's going on there. These are my friends, this is a huge part of their culture so let's go. I need to have something prepared, but the fact that... I wouldn't even call them religious overtones, is certainly like an undertone I think. In my own feeling about it, it's like...
Doug Burke:
It is a religious undertone. It's not overt.
Jenny Van West:
It's like an undercurrent. Yeah.
Doug Burke:
Like bludgeoning you over the head.
Jenny Van West:
Right. Exactly. When we were making this record, it was like okay, so that's what the song is about. Obviously the message has that and this is what I'm going for. How do we create that vibe in the studio without people feeling like they're getting hit over the head with it or even just the overt, even just like... it's a covert gospel song, I think is what we're getting down to.
Doug Burke:
Covert gospel. That's a new category.
Jenny Van West:
Covert gospel. Yeah.
Doug Burke:
You're going to be on Sirius radio, the covert gospel station.
Jenny Van West:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
Pretty soon.
Jenny Van West:
Make sure
Doug Burke:
488 on your dial. I really like after the chorus, is it a dobro? What's the interlude, the musical interlude?
Jenny Van West:
Jesse Siebenberg is all over this record and his contributions on lap steel, pedal steel, which is on Never Alone. He did percussion, he did 12 string guitar, dobro, ukulele, baritone guitar.
Doug Burke:
And he is an amazing session musician?
Jenny Van West:
Yes.
Doug Burke:
Who did he play with?
Jenny Van West:
He was touring with Lukas Nelson. He comes from a long standing California musical family. He's one of the most beautiful people I've ever met. Just a lovely... I mean, everybody on this record is not only fantastic musicians, they're also just lovely people. Like really, really great people, which... I can just wax poetic about that for a while, but getting him that was Shane's doing. He used to play in Shane's band. He's been on Shane's albums. He's played with tons of people in the LA area. It was uncertain actually whether or not we were going to be able to catch him because that was a year he was touring with Lukas Nelson. He was in and out of town. He's got a young family. I mean, there's just all the considerations. Shane was able to get him. When his contributions to this album came back, it was so clear to me that we had just taken it to the next level to use a hacky phrase, but we had just taken this record to the next level. It was already sounding great and then it was really clear, like okay, we're just... this is going to push things over the top. I think one of the things that I appreciate about all these musicians that are on this record, but I'll just speak about Jesse specifically, is that his breadth of expression on the instruments that he plays is unparalleled really. As a writer that writes in multiple genres, I'm always looking for what's going to give me the most of the type of impact that I want to create with this particular song. You'd have musicians like that who can not just settle into any kind of vibe but enhance and draw out the form of expression that the artist is leaning towards. This is something that like Shane blew my mind at every turn. I was like, I don't even understand how is it possible for a producer to get that far into the songs with that level of understanding of what we're trying to pull out. I mean, he would make suggestions and then he would bring people in and then we would hear what had transpired and the past week of recording or whatever. This constellation of people and the way my producer was able to work with them and really get inside these songs and understand what needed to happen in a way that I wasn't capable of expressing.
Doug Burke:
I really like this particular break because it's a musical break. You wrote the lyrics and you wrote the melody of Never Alone. It gets to this point and this instrument that you probably didn't pick this musician who's like clearly gifted by God with some talent, has come up with this phrasing that's perfect. You listen to the song and you're like, that is so cool.
Jenny Van West:
Thank you. Yeah. I actually realized that I had another intelligent thing to say about this moment in this particular song. I haven't talked about this in a while. One of my fascinations is like writing better bridges. I'm always looking for a way to write a better bridge because I think that there's so many different ways to do it. There's so many different ways to position a bridge in a song. I mean, you can put a bridge in the first 45 seconds. It can be done and it has been done by artists that are way more accomplished than I, but the thing that came with this song was... I probably wrote like seven, eight, nine bridges for the song and it kept being a mute bridge. Like there's no words in this bridge. If I had the opportunity to do something like go to Berklee school of music or just something like that I would have learned all about this before, but to me it was like this enormously liberating discovery because what I wanted was that space. I wanted that air. That progression that I came up with, what I really wanted in part was to give that feeling of a break and to also give a sense of key modulation, like the sun coming out without modulating. What he created there is just this soaring quality to what's there. Just emphasized and I so intelligently elaborated on that thing that I was after. Like going back to what I was saying before of like creating tenfold what I was going for, really understanding that. There's a level of sensitivity I think that... this is setting aside the decades of experience and the will to do the work, the work ethic. There is a sensitivity that to be there in terms of supporting musicians in order to create something like that. That's where the sort of gift from God comes in. Without the work ethic, without the decades of experience and the fearlessness of going on the road with these things and so forth, there has to be that basic sensitivity, that ability to listen and ask not what the song could do for me, but what can I do for the song? What can I add that's not taking anything away? That's pretty sensitive.
Doug Burke:
Yeah. No, the sound captures the feeling to the point where it doesn't need words. Which I love. (singing). Let's talk about Embers. This one you start with piano chords in a melancholy way with a haunting violin. Again, a different kind of intro, which I love about your album.
Jenny Van West:
Yes. This song was written to really encapsule the sensation of what it means to either be working with one or two other people in close cahoots as musicians, performing musicians, or most importantly as a community. Like that really feels like a song that's written from a community perspective. It actually came from a comment by one of my non-musical mentors about the way musicians work together, even just wholly professional relationships. There's this aspect to it that... there's a shared body and that's the music. It's not a child. I don't give birth to these things. The idea of a shared body being the song is the basis for where that song came from and then... Obviously there's lyrical elements to that that are just taken from centuries of songwriting. Like the only thing I ever owned is borrowed and that's not original to me. That concept has existed in many songs over time. In this particular song at a very basic existential level, I'm talking about the body. It's like it is in some ways the only thing we own and yet we take it on and we have to leave it behind, so it's really borrowed and songs are borrowed too. Even if the person dies the song continues to exist. It's not something that's indistinguishable from the person. We create these things sometimes with other people. The idea of the shared body being the song is really the root of that one.
Doug Burke:
You start so many of the lyrics with let's. Let's, let's, let's, let's and it's let us. It's very much of a call to community. The thing I love about this song is how crystal clear and pure your voice is. Some people hate to hear their own voice on recording and I guess to be a songwriter and a performer, you got to learn to live with it and perhaps love it from the get go. I don't know where you fall on that but your voice on this is so crystal clear and beautiful. I just love it, and it's part of the album throughout, but this particular song, your vocal comes forward much more to me on this song.
Jenny Van West:
That was Shane's doing. He has a fantastic studio in Ventura County. When we were recording the vocals for this one, I really appreciate you talking about that because I'm remembering now what was going on that day in history. It's the beginning of April in 2017 and woke up to the news that we had just randomly dropped some gigantic bomb on Syria and I woke up to that and I'm basically in this very profound liminal state of being in the middle of recording a record in a place I've never been, with people I've never met besides my producer. I get this news and... so I dedicated, I took a selfie of myself. I put on Instagram. I dedicated that song that day, the recording of that song to the people of Syria. I was like, what else am I going to do? I can't do anything else. There's nothing else to do except to find a way to express compassion, and I think clear to Shane from the moment he heard that song, that that was going to be track 10 on the record. Sometimes it's hard to find that track 10. How do you close out a record? I mean like a lot of people don't even listen to records anymore, but as artists we still create-
Doug Burke:
Right. A world where the computer decides what we're going to listen to.
Jenny Van West:
Yeah, exactly, or you got that favorite song. It's so easy to go find it and put it on repeat now, which is a beautiful thing.
Doug Burke:
Or a playlist.
Jenny Van West:
Or a playlist. Right. Exactly. Songs have to be produced as their own entities as well, but we were both invested in creating a record. I was going to press vinyl. I did press vinyl. I burned CDs, I press vinyl. We're part of the small population of people who's thinking about that maybe in terms of this particular record, but it was clear that was going to be the closing song. I think from the beginning, it was being held in this kind of elevated position of being the final song on the record and obviously it's at one end of the spectrum of, or one side of the sphere of the spectrum of vibes and moods on that record. I think the way it was produced and the fact that Shane was working with Brian Yaskulka who is a sonic imaging genius. When you listen to that song on headphones, you are hanging in space with that song and nothing else, and I think that... I still get that feeling down the back of my neck when I listen to that recording. I mean, I was moved to tears when I heard these mixes. When I heard the final mixes on these, I fell on the ground and like cried. I mean, it was a powerful experience and on this song in particular, the poignancy of what that song is about is reflecting the production to a very great degree as you're describing.
Doug Burke:
Bandits on the Run in that interview they said, they know a song is done when the cello player cries.
Jenny Van West:
The cello player cries.
Doug Burke:
She's in the Bandits. She's like, when I start crying, then I know the song is done.
Jenny Van West:
One more thing I wanted to say about that song is that, as we were working with the list of about 15, 17 songs that I was comfortable with and felt right about putting on a record, it was interesting to see what Shane picked, because I was like... I have my own thoughts here but I am hiring him as a producer and I want to know what he thinks. It was interesting, like there were some surprises for me and actually this song, the fact that he loved this song so well and he could see exactly where it was going on. The record actually surprised me. I'm not really sure why. I don't really remember why, but I just wanted to offer that because this is one of the ways I yet hold lightly on my work, is to always with trepidation but there's some people I'm like, nope, I totally trust you and there's a really short list of people I would trust to produce one of my records and Shane was definitely the right one for the job.
Doug Burke:
One of those songs that I love the arrangement on is Empty Bowl where you have these overlapping sounds between the acoustic guitar and the piano and the Hammond and the bass drum thump, thump that starts it and they're not playing the same melody at the same time. They're syncopated, but they're combined into this, and then the lyrics you talk about these childlike experiences. I was wondering where that came from. Did it come from your own childhood?
Jenny Van West:
It's a funny story with that one actually. I was visiting some family and it was in the evening and I started to notice that I just was not being a terribly nice person and so I sent myself to my room.
Doug Burke:
We should all do that more.
Jenny Van West:
Right. Well, we're all kind of forced to do it now. It's like we kind of like to get out of our rooms. I set myself up to my room where I stay at my parents' house and I just told myself, I'm not coming back down until I can say something nice, which was the next day. I think I might've been visiting my parents without all of my family. I think my kids were there and it was just me and them. I was like, well, I'm a songwriter. I'm going to sit down and I'm going to write. In the room where I stay at my parents' house, there's beautiful old desk with a mirror over it and on top of the desk is this hand turned wooden bowl. My aunt who lives down in North Carolina has collected a lot of work from artisans down in Black Mountain area in Asheville up in the mountains. Anyways, beautiful hand turned wooden bowl and I was like, just be the empty bowl and I was like, really? We're going to write that song.
Doug Burke:
That's a terrible lyric. I could never write a song and I'm not calling it empty bowl.
Jenny Van West:
I know, right? I'm not calling it empty bowl, and I'm not going to take it to California, produce it with all these fantastic musicians and have it coming out sounding fabulous. I didn't think all of those things. Every songwriter has moments when they're angry and they're trying to figure out how to say that stuff. Even if it's totally unjustified, like in my situation. There's no reason for me to be angry about anything that night. It was just the way I was feeling. I'm not a good angry songwriter. I don't know. Maybe they cut too hard or I just haven't got the distortion going loud enough on my electric yet but it's like, I don't write angry songs very well, but that was actually a sublimated angry song and it was really, the first line that came to me and I was like, we're going to roll with that. It was like 100% advice to myself and I wrote it in about 30 minutes. I wrote a couple of verses. We ended up taking one out that didn't really work as well. Actually and we took half of the bridge. I had a longer bridge in there, but we paired down to the core, core message and made enough space in it that there was room for enhancement elaboration musically. The simpleness of the chord progression came out of that moment. That was a pretty quick one. I call that writing as an aside. Like, okay, I've got this other song. I'm just like breaking my head against. I'm sure I had like some other song that it was horribly overwritten, but that's just how I keep my chops up. I write, I write, I write, I write it, I write, and then I just like oh, screw it. I just need to write something and that's where the better songs come from. I'm not beating my head against a wall. I'm not over trying. I'm just in good shape and then the good song can come out, so that's where that one came from the song.
Doug Burke:
The song has one of my favorite lyrics, “just head down that hill, let life live you,” which is really such a simple thing, but I've never heard it expressed that way.
Jenny Van West:
Yeah. To this day I'm not sure if I agree with that. It's interesting that line came to me that night and I remember the feeling of like that line came to me and I was just like, what? It doesn't make any sense. That's a 180 from the way I usually try to live, which is trying to move towards being more intentional and less asleep about things. Right? And I was like, whoa, but I think that's the message that I'm needing right now. Like just... let's take the edge off here. Let's not overstate the importance of this one life, even though it is the only life I have and it is very important. The same way with everyone. It's like there's a time to be forceful and intentional and for some of us, there are more times that naturally happen like that and so like for me, my job is to... I've learned from this song. In part it's like there are times to just... Feeling it these last couple months. It's time to just like take a step back. Let time pass. Let the life go.
Doug Burke:
Talk to me about the musical arrangement. Am I reading it right there where you have these... it almost feels like it might be hard to play because everybody comes in at a different part of the song.
Jenny Van West:
Yeah. Right. If I'm remembering all this correctly. I mean, the way I play that solo, I do put a lot of syncopation and my guitar forms with my right hand. Whether I'm strumming or picking or whatever, one of the things that Shane did so brilliantly and I was so moved by with this song was picking up on the melodic elements of my solo guitar playing. That was endemic to the basic guitar form that was there. Those different pieces that are happening actually are pulled out of the core guitar playing for that song.
Doug Burke:
On Where I Stand, you start with your acoustic guitar and brushes on the tramp this time. That's again a different kind of intro for the other songs. What's this song about?
Jenny Van West:
Where I Stand, in terms of production one of the things that was... I'll just start there for a second. It was absolute magic watching Shane work with Austin on the drums for the song because Austin Beede is an incredible accomplished drummer, so responsive in the studio, so knowledgeable about music, and then what we were doing is we get a few takes and then it was later that we were sitting with decisions about what we wanted out of the drums for each of these songs. This is as good funny story of the two, is that living in Maine, we have a wood stove. We have a basement. We have first floor, second floor. There's a lot of going up and downstairs for things and we throw wood down the basement in the winter time when we need to grab some wooden snowing sideways, we just go down the basement, grab some wood. Some of the things I like to joke about is that when I run down the basement stairs and then I forget why I'm there, I just get a piece of firewood and bring it back upstairs. It's like, oh, okay. I don't know what I was doing down here. It was about 11:00 at night and all the lights were out and I was upstairs obviously going to bed a lot earlier than I normally do because it was only about 11:00. I ran downstairs and suddenly found myself standing in the middle of my dining room and having no idea why I was there and house was totally dark and I was like, "Well, there's a great metaphor. We're just going to write about that." A lot of my songs are just fictional. They sound very personal in tone, but they're just written freely and working with metaphor and so that was the metaphor I was working there. It was just one of those brainless moments in the dark, literally in the dark.
Doug Burke:
I love this line, “Edges tell a story of a world that's been erased. Darkness took the clarity that longing has replaced.”
Jenny Van West:
Yeah. Again, I always try to write songs that have a personal tone that people can place themselves in somehow. Being a very visual person, a lot of my songs come to me in pictures and so I just... I've learned to trust that because all my best songs have been written that way and it's sort of like a slideshow in my head. With this one they're just capping image after image after image about sight and light. Quite literally when we're in the dark the edges of things are muted. Our eyes just don't interpret things the same way. They can misinterpret things. They can see things that aren't there and there's all kinds of things that can happen when we're actually physically standing in the dark trying to find something, trying to remember something, trying to look for something and we don't have the benefit of that light shedding on the edges of things just to show us where we are. That accidental moment and my recognition of such is like, oh, metaphor. Let's do this. Let's write a song about this, yielded a lot of imagery that I just tried to respect when it came to me.
Doug Burke:
It's really funny because the song is called Where I Stand, but like you're really lost in the song. You lost the door to a promised land, a broken lock and the key in my hand. Oh my God. That sounds so frustrating.
Jenny Van West:
Well, and also-
Doug Burke:
That's where I stand.
Jenny Van West:
That's where I stand. Just one last note about that. The preproduction on this was excruciating for me because I had played it in a slightly different form for several years and I'd performed it a lot and I had collaborated with people on it repeatedly. There was a certain balance to the arrangement that was lacking and I had done that intentionally but it wasn't working for Shane. In the spirit of like, okay, I'm going to find out what I got to learn about this. I mean, obviously I'm not done as a songwriter and hopefully I get to do this for another 30, 40 years and I still won't be done, but I was like, let's see what we can come up with here. He really helped me to the task of balancing the arrangement of that song and filling it out in certain places lyrically, which is where some of those lines came from about the broken lock. It's interesting because I've sung it so much this way now. I actually can't even remember what used to be there. I'd have to ask one of my buddies about that, but that one I lost sleep over, but it settled. That song settled and then it was ready to be charted and then ready for the studio.
Doug Burke:
Well, you wrote it while you were sleepwalking for goodness sake. Got up in the middle of the night and woke up in your living room not knowing where you were but-
Jenny Van West:
Yeah. Well I wasn't quite asleep yet. I was actually still asleep. Yeah, it was good but yeah, you're onto this one.
Doug Burke:
I like the way it ends with these contrasting guitars, which I'm sure you can't quite capture solo unless you've got like some foot pedal recording going on, but it has these layers of guitars at the end that compliment each other and contrast each other.
Jenny Van West:
One of the things I love about the way this album is produced generally is that there are these moments that feel like fugues without being over complicated or messy or in any way shape or form muddy. None of it.
Doug Burke:
Yeah. Empty Bowl has that fugue moment. This is definitely... like I was looking for that word. It's very fugue like. I was thinking almost around, what they used to call around.
Jenny Van West:
Right.
Doug Burke:
Well, Jenny Van West, I have to thank you. This has been a real pleasure to have you on Back Story Song and I have to thank you for your new gift to us in the album, Happiness to Burn, which I understand peaked at number seven on the Euro Americana Chart. We can't wait for your next album and maybe you'll come back to Back Story Song to talk to us about that when you get out of this corona quarantine and we get you back in the studio for another album.
Jenny Van West:
Well, thank you so much for having me, Doug. It's been an absolute pleasure to talk with you. I feel like we could talk all day. This is one of my favorite topics, so yeah, I would absolutely love to come back when the next album Indigo Blonde is out, which it's going to be in the 2020s. Sometime in the 2020s.
Doug Burke:
Indigo Blonde. All right, I can't wait, but I have to thank in our studio here, Wyatt Schmidt, our sound engineer who is also a DJ. DJ Wyatt Schmidt.
Jenny Van West:
All right. Well, thank you Doug.
Doug Burke:
Thank you Jenny Van West.
