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Jana Hunter - Zo Caffe, Bologna |
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Words: Gracelette
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Photography: Grant Peden
She
looks like the kind of girl who’d hang out with
you on dusty kerbs, who’d not feel obligated
by crap ideas of femininity to scream at spiders,
and who’d never play dumb so the boys would
like her. Proper. Dude. She’s probably in her
twenties, like me, but I still want to ask her to
be my mum…somebody’s mum. She looks dead
capable, like she’d make a good mum if she’s
not one already.
She steps up to the mic, starts to sing. Her
voice is lowdown and jazzy and gutsy and
direct. She’s got a thick Southern accent and,
call it folk, country, or blues, she’s hailing from
a genre in which strong women with hidden
vulnerabilities deal with whatever gutpunches
life throws at ‘em then sing the pain away.
It’s hard to make out any distinct words as she
lingers over the syllables, drawing them out
with summertime laziness before lurching up
to the next note. But I don’t need to know what
words she’s singing, just like I didn’t need to
know, way back before I could talk, that my
mum was singing about scarlet ribbons and
the white cliffs of Dover. And I find myself
thinking not just of my mum, but mums and
babies in general and what exactly was going
on when they sang to us.
Because lullabies are meant to soothe you
to sleep, but there’s something terrifying
and disorientating about being forced to
remember the vulnerability of being too young
to understand the words. It’s this vulnerability
that Jana pushes onto us by singing as though
she’s the only one in this crowded room
capable of understanding the lyrics, allowing
her voice to lurch and list through the words
like an unmanned ship, distorting their sense.
Maybe it felt scary for my mum too when she
sang to me, unable to communicate verbally
with the crying thing in her arms.
But Jana doesn’t sound scared, she sounds
strong as she sings “my pain is fantastic” (the
lyrics sheet says it’s really her ‘aim’). The
strength, too, is equal parts comforting and
disturbing. There’s the comfort of the lullaby,
the way that singing voices reassured us in our
earliest moments. But there’s darkness too.
There’s a lack of sentimentality in Jana’s voice.
Even as I want her voice to hold me, I can hear,
in its strength and simplicity, the other side of
motherness, the kind of flat-eared pragmatism
that eats its young. She doesn’t try to hide it.
Why would she? That pragmatism is the
unspoken threat at the heart of every lullaby:
what might happen if you don’t go to sleep.
At times, she reminds me of Tracy Chapman
in ‘Behind The Wall’, singing about hearing a
neighbour getting beaten up by her husband
and the silence that follows. The lyrics sheet
suggests she wouldn’t stand for such things
(“I’ll carry your backbone round in my pants”),
but her voice is filled with similarly domestic
kinds of emotion, whether mourning a family
death, or crying after violence, or laughing
with your friends around the kitchen table
because what else can you do? And what’s
really disturbing is quite how close to these
things a lullaby can sound. So maybe that’s why
she sings: “This cradle is a tomb, an everlasting
sense of doom. My momma’s in her room. She’s
dead; she died too soon.”
But then there are the crescendos. They’re
great stonking things of defiant enjoyment,
selfish and unrestrained, that perfectly balance
the lullaby moments by reminding you that
even mums have a right to a life outside of
looking after you. She deploys noise and silence
with such grace. Not since Low live in 2004 and
High On Fire on Blessed Black Wings in 2006
have I heard musicians listening this hard to
themselves and throwing that experience back
on their audience. And, sure, I’ll compare a
Texan singer songwriter, whose Blank
Unstaring Heirs Of Doom album will be the
first release on Devendra Banhart’s new label,
to a lo-fi indie rock trio and the best metal
band I’ve heard in recent years because
that understanding of noise and silence
transcends genre.
Yet Jana is of her genre, and it’s shot
through with domesticity. As she dances with
awkward jerky movements, handclaps her way
through an unaccompanied refrain about
laughing and crying being the same thing, then
crouches down low on the ground, she seems
to perform without awareness of an audience,
setting her music firmly within the context of
the home.
So when Jana crescendos, voice rising and
falling, guitar building to a full-on vamping
noise before dropping away, leaving only the
hum of conversation from the café next door,
she doesn’t sound like somebody’s mother or
wife or daughter. She just sounds like those
moments when you’re singing alone in your
bedroom, then you pause, hear only the
neighbour’s TV set through the walls, and
realise just how loud you’ve been singing,
before smiling inside and starting back up
to drown them out again.
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