Live Nation Presents
JORDANA
Wed
Feb 5
08:00 pm
(Doors: 07:30 pm )
16 and up
Live Nation Presents
JORDANA
with special guest
RACHEL BOBBITT
Wednesday, February 5th 2024
Doors at 7:30 / Show at 8:00
16+
Advance General Admission Ticket: $17 + fees
Day of Show GA Ticket: $20 + fees
Artists
Who is Jordana Nye? And what is her signature sound? It depends on when you ask.
The 24-year-old, Maryland-raised songwriter arrived on the music scene with 2020's Classical Notions of Happiness, an album of lo-fi pop and hushed folk songs recorded in her Maryland & Kansas bedrooms. She'd be back by the end of that same year with Something To Say To You, a compilation of two EPs featuring craggy indie rock and brokenhearted acoustic fare recorded in NYC apartment studios with friends.
By 2022 she was swinging for the fences with the pristine pop of Face The Wall, all while shuttling back and forth between Brooklyn and her soon-to-be home of Eagle Rock, LA collaborating on a wide array of projects with a who's who of Gen Z artists: Magdalena Bay, TV Girl, Yot Club, Paul Cherry, Dent May, Inner Wave.
"I don't think I'll ever settle on a specific sound," says Jordana. "I'm just a chameleon."
So her vibrant fourth LP, Lively Premonition, which is equal parts Laurel Canyon folk and shimmering yacht rock, should surprise no one.
"Maybe it's my LA record," she says of the album she worked on with producer and multi-instrumentalist Emmett Kai for the entirety of 2023. "I can't pinpoint exactly what affected it, but I do think the sun has its beam on me. Through all of these releases, it's so cool to see which eras I've gone through and what I've experimented with," says Jordana.
Though the concept of eras is exhaustingly omnipresent at the moment, Jordana has earned the right to draw the definitive lines between her releases and musical phases. Her current iteration owes a debt to a deep love for artists like The Mamas & The Papas, Carole King, Donald Fagen & Walter Becker – all New Yorkers who, like Jordana, moved out west and found their sounds flourishing.
You can hear that newfound confidence on the blissed out opening track "We Get By," a rollicking folk rock epic brave enough to detour into a forty second violin solo. "I'm fully back on my violin shit and it feels good. I'm so glad I rediscovered the magic of it," says Jordana of the instrument she studied as a child. "Sometimes you need time away from something to come back to it with open arms."
"The whole record is this mixed bag of tricks with plenty of cheeky lyrical and instrumental decisions," she says. "We're taking tons of risks here."
But it's not just the music that takes risks on Lively Premonition, Jordana's writing blossoms as well. For the first time ever, the thematic and conceptual preoccupations of her songs stem from stories both real and imagined. "I was actually ushered into a new process of writing I didn't think I was capable of," she says. "Making shit up!"
On "Like A Dog" a jaunty bassline leads a sunbeam synth and staccato piano stabs under a song about being a dog for someone's admiration. "I love how theatrical it sounds with the metaphorical humor of being a dog for someone," says Jordana. "But the breakup songs were straight up for the most part — I don't fuck around with that."
So ultimately the core of the record comes back to her lived experience: crumbling relationships, a newfound sobriety, finding a place in a new city and people to help build it with her.
"It's about the cycle of love, heartbreak, lust, party-going, self acceptance, connections, and rediscovering yourself over and over again," says Jordana about the album's themes. "I can't thank Emmett enough for basically being my therapist through all of it."
The results of these therapy sessions often exist at two poles: glitzed out parties like "Raver Girl" and "Multitudes of Mystery" or golden hour ballads like "Anything For You" and "The One I Knew." Two sides from a record that refuses to be content with staying still, much like the artists responsible for it.
"It makes me wonder what I'll do next. Country? Folk? Go back to my Lindsey Stirling Dubstep violin obsession? Hell, why not!? I'm learning more and more about myself through each one."
Luckily, listeners are too.
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Life runs in rhythmic loops, from the endless rotations of the earth to the running of tides and yearly rebirth of spring. Rachel Bobbitt knows that the bottom of those cycles can feel pretty chaotic. “Every woman I’ve ever talked to is in some amount of pain almost all the time,” the Toronto-based singer-songwriter says. “That could be physical pain, emotional pain, familial pain, but it’s there in cycles.” On her piercing and profound new EP, The Ceiling Could Collapse (due July 15th, 2022, via Fantasy Records), Bobbitt picks through the dizzying rubble of folk and indie rock for moments of resonant emotion and frames them in heartbreaking lyrics and openhearted expanses.
Before reaching this particular iteration of her musical journey, Bobbitt made a name for herself on Vine as a teenager in Nova Scotia, uploading covers of pop hits and all-time classics to the now-defunct social media site. The young Canadian digested a wide range of music, from Frank Ocean to Leonard Cohen, Elliott Smith to My Bloody Valentine, and began incorporating those influences into original songs. But as her profile rose, Bobbitt found herself overwhelmed rather than inspired. “It was exciting to be doing what I loved, but it was difficult to be observed by that many people at that age where I simultaneously wanted to just shut myself in,” she says. “I’m grateful it ended when it did, because it gave me time to step back and think about what I wanted to create for myself.”
On the opener to The Ceiling Could Collapse, “More,” Bobbitt combines the thrills of those inspirations via tightly woven layers of vocals and empty late-night highway pacing. “They say the body’s just a thing to house the mind/ But mine keeps betraying me night after night,” she sighs, as collaborator and co-producer Justice Der laces in an arcing electric guitar. The song’s talk of wasted potential and frustrated connection, meanwhile, tap into another life cycle. “It’s all about this body that I have, suffering from the migraines I’ve inherited from my mom,” Bobbitt explains. “But it’s also about how some people see women as being made for having children, something I don’t even necessarily want at this point.”
Bobbitt found herself in a serious cycle of introspection during the pandemic, having just decided to leave the jazz program at Humber College and focus on her own music. She holed up in Saskatoon to write, the negative temperatures seeping their way into the compositions even while her indelible warmth radiates throughout. After refining these six songs on her own, she brought together Der and drummer Stephen Bennett to record the EP at Bennett’s studio in Brampton, Ontario. The trio spent a week and a half cracking open Bobbitt’s compositions, leaving space to experiment on different vocal takes and sonic palettes. The rippling “Watch and See” showcases that vibrant freedom, scorched guitar lines frayed underneath the aching chorus. Throughout the EP, Bobbitt and Der’s arrangements strike into the deep waters of Phoebe Bridgers, Bon Iver, and Big Thief, and Grammy-nominated mixer Jorge Elbrecht rounds everything to a glacial shine.
The Ceiling Could Collapse centers on the cycles of life and how we find meaning in those extremes: pain, joy, wonder, love. In addition to music, Bobbitt draws those same feelings from horror films—and actually pulled the title to this EP while reading the script to 2018’s Hereditary. A horror fan as inspired by the genre’s cavernous emotions as its artful mechanisms, Bobbitt was so enamored by Ari Aster’s film that she needed to dig into its architecture. She focused on a deleted scene, in which one-character attempts to comfort another in a time of trauma by reminding them that the world is chaotic, that questioning why bad things happen is pointless in a world where the roof could just fall on you at any moment. “We need to accept that we can’t have our minds fixated on all these things that could happen, and we need to move on—but also the ceiling could just collapse,” she laughs. More than unpredictability, it’s the endless repetition of life that suggests both things are true, that there’s no reason to worry and something terrible is about to happen. She carries that duality through to EP highlight “Bandages,” a bracing track that questions the nature of healing. “Said I love you/ Like it’s healing/ Like if it matters if I’m here or I’m not,” she calls out, the drip-drop of icy guitar and a faded drumbeat low beneath her, wondering why a broken heart can be so physically painful but spoken words can’t always make it better.
Rather than be boxed by any singular definition or truth, Bobbitt finds comfort in the complexity—befitting her experience as a twin, which inspires “Gemini Ties.” “My brother and I have that inseparable connection, and it manifests in me wanting to shelter him from every bad thing, even though he’s more than capable of doing that himself,” she says. Later, “What About the Kids” plays into family as well, Bobbitt reflecting on a loss in her family, and the ways in which we try to protect each other from the sadness that inevitably cycles back into life.
“Nothing could keep you here for me/ And me for you,” Bobbitt sings on closer “For Keeps” before violin curls carry the song out on a breeze. And while that finality is sung with certainty, there’s a contented sigh as much as a sadness, an appreciation of the time that was equal to the pain of the now, a knowledge that the cycle continues. The ceiling collapse may be inescapable, but once it’s gone, there’s just more room for the sunrise to peek through.
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