JESS KLEIN SAYS DON'T WAIT FOR GODOT BUT TAKE THE CANNOLI
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IF YOU’RE HEARING it first on her new record of pop songs that come from earthy roots, when Jess Klein sings “I’m done being small/Wanna grow my heart so big, my spine so tall”, it’s handy to know this isn’t new, Klein told us a while back in a song that she was tougher than she seemed. that you’d be wrong to assume a quiet voice, a small frame, a willingness to listen and change was a weakness to exploit.
Now a long-term resident of Hillsborough, North Carolina, she meant it on a micro and macro level, both to her immediate life and to the changing nature of the country – not the people, but those who sought to lead the people – around her.
This new album, Dreaming Aloud, confirms that, but it does so not with aggression but with positivity, an assumption that not everyone faced with unreasonable behaviour succumbs or copies or supports the worst. “And we gotta believe we are more than our failures/More than our sins,” she says in the album’s closing song, All It’ll Take, arguing that you’re capable, we’re all capable – not some or other god or some or other ideology, but us, in concert.
“I just have a belief that we wouldn’t be here if we couldn’t figure out a way forward, you know?,” she says. “I guess I’ve just always felt like if I’m alive here and now then there’s some purpose for that and I might as well celebrate it and try to encourage other people to feel that way too.”
What may read as kumbaya is not that at all in person or in song – even as today she holds up, with a grin, a scrap of paper on which is written “Everything is working out for my best and highest good” – Klein prepared to call bullshit on things like treatment of women, of the creation of an underclass, the demonisation of the “other” in whatever form. There’s no claim to exceptionalism either, no suggestion she’s stronger than others, only the thought that if she can, we could too.
“I’m just a person who was born in a middle-class suburb in a mid-sized city and I had an ok childhood,” she says, with a self-mocking laugh. “There’s nothing about my circumstances that make me extraordinary. It’s just I think that life is a series of choices.”
One of her choices, as she says on the album is “I come to live in wonder”, a declaration that she remains open to joy and trust, and sharing that. Take the song I Wanna Be Love, which does not say I want to be loved, as in taking/receiving, but I want to be love, a giving out, a sharing.
“Hard shit happens and then you just, again you just get to decide how to show up. It’s not that complicated. Your brain can make it complicated, and mine can definitely complicate pretty much everything, but it’s like if there’s any energy we can tap into that’s sort of bigger than us, but inside us too, why not? Why not tap into it?”
If it seems like a long diversion into almost existential questioning when a new album of quality songs is available to discuss, it’s worth noting that in the title track, which opens the album, Klein directly references Waiting For Godot and ponders if the waiting, the search is the point, not the answer that might be promised. If an answer exists. You can complicate or you can decide do you look for love – the positive, the valuable, the shared and the enriching – or do you hide from its absence?
“Waiting for the perfect reason or the perfect way to say something or the perfect moment … ,” she says. “I mean, I sometimes think this whole thing, life, is an experiment so you know, try something.”
The results can be seen in a song like What If, which feels like chanson, classically sad but sadness with love, making life possible even when hard. “We’re all calling like we’ve never called before/For the strength to build a doorway/And the courage/To open up the door,” Klein sings. Or maybe even in the warmth and understanding of melancholy within Delay The Sunrise that I’d have paid good money to have heard Dusty Springfield sing.
“I had a project a few years ago, like a jazz standards thing, and we did a lot of Great American Songbook, and I think it really seeped into to my writing of music,” explains Klein. “I loved those songs because it was like there’s so much space in them and I think it taught me that I could stretch my voices in way that I had forgotten or wasn’t used to doing. It taught me not to push. I can belt some notes but it’s nice not to have to, to be gentle and just … remember.”
Not that those were the only, or even main, reference points for Dreaming Aloud. The two albums Klein took into the project as some kind of guides were Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks and Led Zeppelin II. Recorded about a year apart, both involving British/Irish men out of their comfort zones in the USA, but otherwise maybe an unlikely pairing, unless you want to be more literal and see them in the energised country rock of Old Rock’n’Roller, a song that is overflowing with enjoyment.
“I wanted something in between them. Both of those albums make interesting use of space, an interesting ensemble,” she says, a bit hesitantly. “I’ll just leave, I’ll just leave it at that.”
Maybe it was a counterweight or complementary to another influence on her, emotionally if not necessarily musically, her volunteer work at a local hospital in Durham, North Carolina, where she performs for patients. She plays what they ask for rather than her own songs, offering what she calls “these clarifying moments” as she sees the song that give people hope or soothe or lift spirits, giving them, as with her own songs, “permission to feel”.
What songs are most asked for? Please god, let it not be Sweet Caroline.
“Oh god, no, no. Luckily, no one’s ever asked me to sing that,” says Klein. But she does get a lot of Willie Nelson requests. Which makes sense. And one that maybe doesn’t.
“The strangest thing anyone ever asked me to play was the theme song to The Godfather. Which I couldn’t do.”
What a shame, missing out on the chance to say as a kind of (end-of-)life advice, leave the gun, take the cannoli. Which, the more I think about it, could be a Jess Klein song.
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Jess Klein – Dreaming Aloud is out on June 12.