Jess Klein - Backstage

Listening to Ella Fitgerald’s scatting on “Take the ‘A’ Train” made me feel enamored with what humans can achieve when they really focus on and develop their art.  I thought, ‘Will I ever master something like she has mastered that?”  I hope so, but more hope that I remember to find things I haven’t mastered.  That’s the point. 

I was, in fact, on the ‘A’ train, riding from Brooklyn up to Chelsea to meet with Tanya Braganti, the photographer who shot the recording of Draw Them Near, my first album for Ryko, which we recorded in Nashville back in 2000.  Tanya and I were meeting to sort through pics for the best of the early years album my label is putting out this spring. 

As I think about leaving NYC, and as the actual date approaches, everything is sorting into phases - I was always going wherever I ended up and now I’m choosing to go somewhere to create a life - weird phrase since I have a life - but to enter a surrounding one step closer to what my soul looks like - green, slow-growing wilds, something a wood nymph like me would dance around in.  Ultimately I will probably end up in the middle of nowhere, a cabin in the woods, with a fireplace, oatmeal on the stove, that kind of thing.  But I’m still a young woman with some oats to sow.  So Austin it is.  Scary to write this, as it seems to set a chain of events in motion, but since I keep talking about it, it’s not news to anyone else.  And here I am in my least favorite coffeeshop in BK (my fave is closed for renovations - here, I just spent an hour trying to get online!) but as I did, and opened this page, Willie Nelson (Austinite) came on the stereo, singing a plucky version of ‘Midnight Rider’.  Which I think I once went into at the end of Little White Dove, which was a song on Draw Them Near, so isn’t that a complete circle?