Jess Klein – Backstage

I don’t usually like to use this forum for business stuff – maybe that’s foolish, probably so – but it occurred to me there are some of you out there who may not be on my email list, so here goes…

My feisty new booking agent, Tom Baggott, is in the midst of booking me an ambitious national tour to help promote the release of my new album, Bound to Love, which comes out this summer on UFO Records. (I’m so excited! More on that soon…)  Hopefully this tour will bring me face to face with each of you!

The summer tour is shaping up to start around the second week of June and continue with a small break here and there through August, after which I’ll be heading over to Ireland and the UK to do the same.

I love making music, and wouldn’t trade my job for anything in the world.  However, *sometimes* (I use the term loosely) being a musician doesn’t provide a person with a large store of capital, i.e. enough for a car downpayment.

So, the deal I am proposing, more or less, is that if you, or your close, trustworthy friend, has an extra car or van they are not using – or are wanting to sell, but having trouble doing so, given the economic climate – I would potentially like to ‘rent’ it for a couple months.  I would like to be able to do so for either the cost of the insurance, or some weekly or flat rate which makes it worth your while, but saves me more than a rental agency would.

Ideally, your vehicle resides in either central Texas, or in the Southeast, Northeast or Midwestern United States (early stops on the tour).   Non-negotiably, your vehicle is reliable and comfortable for long drives by 2-3 people and a couple of guitars.

Included, as thanks for your extremely generous offering:

*An advanced copy of Bound to Love
*Lifetime guest list for you and a friend for all my shows

*** If you find yourself in the position of being able to actually donate a car for the duration of the summer tour, I will also gladly offer to give a performance in your home, or that of a friend with a big living room (!), no charge, for yourself and your friends.  (If this is a brand new concept to you, you can read more about House Concerts at www.concertsinyourhome.com)***

If you are interested in making a deal (!)  please drop a line to jess@jessklein.com and my management will forward it to me!  Then we can start haggling : )

I am really looking forward to seeing you all on the road, and maybe pulling up in your car!

Thanks again for being such warm company for this travelin’ troubadour.

Love,

Jess

Walking today down S 1st, trying to fend off the crankiness that comes over some people, like me (!) when it gets really hot out, my visiting friend and I ducked into a secluded garden shop/artist space called Happiness – immediately cooled us off.  Out back was a ‘bottle house’ made with loads of glass bottles in the walls to deflect light, a recycled mosaic.  This tile mosaic was on the outside:

Since moving to Austin, I’ve learned to have a sort of a reverence about the venue Antone’s – it’s a legendary club which was the stomping ground of Stevie Ray Vaughn and continues to be the place to hear great national acts coming through town.  I’m so excited I’ll be playing there this Wednesday night (Tax Day)!  A big supporter of the Austin music scene, Duggan Flanakin, recommended me to Chris Brecht, a great songwriter who’s putting the night together.  Also playing will be Tiny Tin Hearts, www.tinytinhearts.ning.com, whom I’ve heard fascinating things about, and their album was produced by George Reiff, who played bass on my new album.

I’m just really excited to be part of a another night of great Austin music.  Every time I have some time off here and get to go see people play, it hits me again how special this town is.  Saturday I was up at the Art Authority at Matt the Electrician’s Island of Lost Souls Festival, watching Sean Hayes, whose music (accompanied by Matt’s band) was like a gypsy travelling show or some kind of Sufi adventure (to my mind).  Sean is actually from California, but I thought, another reason I love to see music in this town is that the people making the music all seem real to me.  They seem ordinary, quirky, beautifully imperfect.   And they make incredible music.  And because they seem real, I feel like I can relate to them and that maybe I could make incredible music without having to be something I’m not.

At any rate, I’ll look forward to doing my best to make something incredible out of my real life Wednesday night.  I hope if you live in or near Austin, I will see you there.

A friend sent me a link to this new Springsteen song from his album coming out next week (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99173117&ps=bb3)

Had an incredible birthday this week.  We were working in the studio when I glanced out the back window and saw my friend Charlie Faye, who is currently on crutches due to a sprained ankle, trying to navigate the dog poop (Mark, one of my producers, whose farmhouse the studio is in, has 4 dogs!), and my other friend David Holmes, who is not on crutches, but was carrying a blue pinata!

Suddenly there were six more people in the studio and a the pinata, which I discovered, after they rigged it up and handed me a blunt intrument, was filled with apples!  (This might not be everyone’s ideal birthday gift, but I can’t eat candy, so I was pretty touched).  Following that mayhem, we all rolled down to Flipnotics and played a crazy show where there were cell phone signals coming through the speakers and all sorts of technical tomfoolery.  I wouldn’t have had it any other way.  It ended with my band and producers singing happy birthday.  I just feel so blessed.  Below, me, and the decapitated pinata, which Scrappy (producer/guitar player) suggested I put on a post on my front lawn as a warning to all the other blue bears.

Once I'd wacked the crap out of it

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In the studio. Matt the Electrician just came in to share his brass stylings with us. He has brass instruments of all sizes, like some old-time peddler of wares he kept pulling out cases of different sizes and shapes. It’s a warm day for January 3, 2009, about 80 degrees. Peanut the studio cat is using the opportunity to nap per usual. There is now a horn section on my song When the Time Comes. It sounds like Louisiana just walked into the room when that moment in the song comes. There’s a warm breeze blowing through the control room out here in the countryside 15 minutes south of town. Freedy Johnston just moved to Austin. He lives out here by the studio so we get the benefit of his presence. I landed in the right place.
Here’s a shot of Peanut, the studio cat:

Peanut

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Blogging to you direct from Aerie Studio in Austin, TX – we’ve just finished the basics for seven of the tracks for the new album. The players: Rob Hooper on drums, George Reiff manning the bass, Scrappy Jud Newcomb on guitar, Mark Addison and Scrappy co-producing. There is a mood and real energy and feeling to every song. Everything’s been broadened, lifted to a new level. I feel like the songs have real lives of their own now, bigger than me, which is the best. And all these great ideas lifting them up makes me feel like I’m really part of something. I don’t know how articulate I sound saying all this, but life is good in the space of making music with gifted players. Just now I was so relieved to hand over my guitar part in one of the songs to Scrappy – just to be able to say, this would be better for the feeling of the track – relieved to not have it be about me having to make my mark in that particular way. We have a couple more days of overdubs and then I head to Nashville to write with Phil Madeira who plays in Emmylou Harris’ band! I came into the studio this time with about 25 songs and now in Nashville I hope to write a few more. I’m interested to see how many I can write in this streak, in this space and time in the world, or my experience of it. It’s been a good streak since moving to Austin. I put myself on a mission this time around that if I could see an uplifting end to the story of a song, I would head for that. I was tired of beleaguering anything, feeling that a greater challenge would be to find the love in any situation. I think we’re calling the album Bound to Love, which was the title of the first song I wrote when I moved into my little cottage in South Austin.

The Austin-American Statesman published a story about the (successful) fight to save our cottages and maintain affordable housing for artists/recycle housing here in Austin:

http://www.austin360.com/music/content/music/stories/2008/12/1203cottages.html

This project has been like a joyful beacon that lots of creative people have been drawn to.  In addition to the exciting chain of events detailed in the Statesman article, 3 local filmmakers are now working together on a documentary about the project.  Maybe we will also go on tour together, and this will eventually be our own O Brother Where Art Thou (film/concert of musicians whose music was featured in the film/documentary about the concert tour).  It could happen!

My cottage, spared from the wrecking ball, and slated for relocation and a contract saying it will always be affordably rented to Artists

I woke up this morning with a complete song in my head.  It was a song I started 3 months ago and got too frustrated to finish.  Today it was fully formed, like a baby, or pillsbury dinner buns.  It’s called, ironically, ‘Am I Making This Hard on Myself?’

After that, I tiptoed into my living room where my friends MC Frontalot and his bassist Bl4k Lotus (he insists I spell his name this way – for those of you who don’t know, it’s pronounced ‘Black’) were sprawled out on my futon and floor after their film screening and show last night here in Austin.  The film is a documentary about them called Nerdcore Rising.  MC Frontalot is a founding father of Nerdcore hip-hop.  Maybe you’ve heard of it!  www.frontalot.com  And if the film is playing in your town, go see it – it’s fantastic.

Sleeping they looked like little babies!  Very cute.  I know them from when we all lived together in Brooklyn and took part in a musical Frontalot and Gaby Alter (their keyboard player) wrote called Young Zombies in Love.  I played a Zombie doo-wop girl.  Shake that booty.  Hope it doesn’t fall off.  Also, you can hear a live version of a collaboration Front and I did where he rapped on my song Soda Water here: http://frontalot.com/index.php/?page=lyrics&lyricid=38

After they woke up, Front insisted I join Twitter, so they hooked me up with that while I made them some tea.  You can ‘follow’ me on there: MsJessKlein is my Twitter name.  Then, incredibly (or not), he also fixed the long-broken playback function on my computer, so I have sound.  I should hang out with nerdcore artists more often.

Life is good.  Off to give Walter, my neighbor, his oven gauge back.  Then I’m hopping on my bike to get the lead out while the sun is still high.  Love!  Jess

So here I am back in TX, after a month in Ireland and England.  I could, and have done, go on at length about how gorgeous Ireland is, how it looks to me like the outward reflection of my soul – (an idea that Anais Nin talks about in one of her diaries.  She says everyone has some place which looks like their soul. I’m grossly paraphrasing, but it’s roughly the idea.)

Last night we had a dinner here at the cottages – I haven’t written about the cottages in a few months, but to summarize, my neighbor decided she wouldn’t stand for our cottages to be torn down in order for the developers to build multi-family condo units.  But here’s the twist in the story: she actually won.  We all won.  She convinced them to give us 6 of the cottages AND enough money to move them to a new plot of land.  Then… we were wondering where on earth we would put them.  Enter Design Build Alliance, a nonprofit headed by UT Architecture Prof. Stephen Ross and Rick Linklater, the filmmaker.  Suddenly we were talking to the right people.  They are funding the project, the land, and putting it into the books that these cottages will forever be rented to artists at an affordable price.  Can you believe it?  Last night all the people involved in the project came by and we had a potluck.  I feel so blessed to live in such a creative community.  That’s a huge understatement.

Today I was knee deep in sorting out emails and receipts post-tour when I got a knock on my door: my friends Charlie and Will were here with a bike – for me!  They knew I needed a bike so they bought one at a Halloween yard sale.  It’s bright blue!

I’m speechless.

Thanks to Charlie and Will!

I was just reminded by my faithful webmaster of my blog password.  Does it matter that I lose all sense of time on the road?

Just off a few shows here in Ireland with the lovely Erin McKeown.  The best of the times, I probably couldn’t really write about here, under some kind of confidentiality agreement for the kinds of jokes that slip our mouths at 3 in the morning and in freezing cold dressing rooms, but let’s just say the girl makes me hold my gut laughing.  We were both still jet-lagged when we took the bus from Cork to Limerick, and passed out in that full on no dreams jet-lag kind of state.  Luckily someone woke her up and so I woke up to her in my face saying “You have to wake up! Now!”

We saw a brilliant band on after us in Cork called Mumford & Sons.  Jesus, they were fantastic.  Kind of like Arcade Fire or something, but really on fire, I mean not really, but almost.

The past few days while my friends were out at work I’ve walked around Dublin in the rain, just so happy to see the place and the people.  I stopped on the canal to look at the Swans and then on some unspoken cue they all began to swim towards me.  I was laughing out loud to myself.  Clearly they thought food would be involved.  I didn’t want to be cruel, so I started walking away, but they were swimming along side, following me.  Then for the craic, I stopped again, I couldn’t help it.  They were undeterred, but I still had no food.

Saw Ron Sexsmith at Whelan’s on Thursday, oh my goodness.  I felt like I learned something about love listening to that man sing and play.

Tied up Halloween by walking around looking at costumes and then watching a few episodes of Father Ted.

New songs are in progress.  It’s strange the in-between stages, where you don’t really know yet what you’re going to say or how it will sound to people.  They’re piling up.  Got about 30 of ‘em now.  My psychic says they’ll all go to some use.  But I think I’ve got a few more to write before recording.

Tonight we’re off to see my old mate Luka Bloom at Vicar Street.  I can’t wait.

As I type this, someone’s on American Idol in the background singing an overwrought version of Time after Time.  I wish our culture didn’t make us so judgmental about everything.  It’s hard to know what the think these days.

We’re all waiting on November 4th…

More soon –