Jana Horn – Optimism
No Quarter – 21 January 2022
Jana Horn is a mystery, and Optimism is something of a mirage. While it is the album she intended to make, it’s not what she made initially. The original album sounded too good. That isn’t what she wanted because it didn’t reflect her or her upbringing. The Texan was raised in Glen Rose, outside of Dallas, in a strict Baptist household. One that seems to be a part of her conflict, “a grad professor once told me that masturbation is writing, as long as you’re looking out a window.” Needless to say, she seems more comfortable in the less restrictive confines of Austin.
There’s a sense of mystery and mirage to her music and lyrics. “Friends Again” begins the album with just two fingers on two strings of her acoustic guitar. The song starts with lines that could as easily be about emerging from the womb as being in a relationship, “You didn’t just push me out/ You dug me out, deep.” Her songs may seem straightforward, but there always seems to be a lot more going on just under the surface.
Recorded with a skeletal crew of accomplices, mostly from Knife on the Water (a band she’d worked with previously), rather than filling up all the space, there’s lots of air. Though Horn hangs back, trying to make sure that the mystery of the music isn’t overwhelmed by her voice and definitely not by her lyrics. Things come at you from weird angles, and where a song starts never seems to be where it ends. “Tonight” begins, “Tonight I wear the color blue/ And sit upon the couch with the cat/ Who would not like it if I moved.” Yet by the song’s end, things are in a far different place.
Using a quarter-note bass riff butting up against soft atmospheric synth lines, “Jordan” explores the connections that lead a breakup song into the realm of a religious nightmare. Horn’s male protagonist is sent from Galilee to meet “a man who is so dark/ he has black bullets in his hands”, hoping to stop a bomb that threatens to “sort out the unclean.” The bass drops out at the end, leaving only strange bell-like sounds.
Closing the album, “When I Go Down Into That Night” asks the kind of question we all have, but rarely ever express, “When I go down into that night/ and there’s no hope in the plan/ and I can barely see my feet/ will you meet me where I stand?” Jana Horn asks questions; she doesn’t answer them. Sometimes only questions exist. Answers can be a lot harder to come by.
The thing she does most clearly, though, is to create the aural equivalent of what a novelist writes, exposing the flaws and the heartbreak that reside in each of us. For Jana Horn, Optimism may be the answer, but there are going to be a lot of mysteries along the way; such is the stuff of life.