Jenny Gillespie's new genre-bending album is Kindred, recorded in Chicago and Austin and produced by producer/multi-instrumentalist Darwin Smith. If Bjork were sitting on Joni Mitchell's front porch under a meteor shower, perhaps this electro-folk-pop record would be the result of their musical conversation. Like a stuttering, color-saturated film revealing images of lovelorn animals, Japanese temples, churning oceans and unfurling blossoms, Kindred tells a mysterious story of vulnerability and desire through haunting vocals, eclectic instrumentation, and dreamy atmospherics. It's soothing, wild music for modern ears. Spiritual, sensual, and cinematic, Kindred marks a departure for Jenny's sound.
Born in Springfield, IL, in 1980, Jenny first picked up her mother's Martin guitar at thirteen after years of classical piano study. Falling in love with the music of Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, and Nanci Griffith, Jenny embarked on a path of writing and performing her own folk music. Though her style has expanded from straightforward folk to atmospheric dream-pop, themes of intimacy, family, spiritual searching in a broken world, and connection with nature have always permeated the stories in her songs. After a few years as a poetry graduate student in Austin, TX, where she recorded the alt-country EP "Love and Ammunition" (that has since been downloaded 24,000 times on Creative Commons' Internet Archive), Jenny moved to Chicago, IL where she formed a band and recorded her first full-length, self-produced album, Light Year, at Electrical Audio in Chicago in 2009. Driven by delicate piano and off-kilter guitar tunings, Light Year garnered comparisons to Bon Iver and Feist; her song "Hummingbirds" won Jenny a spot as a 2009 Williamsburg Songwriting Competition finalist. In Fall 2010, Jenny reconnected with Darwin Smith who had mixed Light Year and they dove into the two-month long recording session for the surprising soundscapes of Kindred. Musicians on the album included Steve Moore on keyboards, Dony Wynn on drums, Gary Newcomb on pedal steel and Jess Klein on backup vocals.