Jordana: “With writing this record, I had a mini epiphany”

Drawing from both heartbreak and humour, Jordana’s new album ‘Lively Premonition’ dives deep into whimsical themes and classic sounds, channelling everything from Steely Dan to… er… armpit farts?!

With new-found creative freedom and a playful spirit, Martyn Young sits down with the alt-pop star to explore how she’s left the bedroom behind and embraced the unexpected on her most authentic record yet.

Words: Martyn Young.

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Inspiration can be found in many places: life-affirming experiences, personal trauma, tumultuous events. For 24-year-old songwriter and alt-pop star Jordana, it can come from all of that and simpler, more primal feelings. “We got all those breakup songs done first,” she explains of the songwriting process for her fourth album, ‘Lively Premonition’. “I’m like, what do I do now? I’ve exhausted this topic. I was like, well, let me think of a dog.”

Therein lies the glorious pleasure of an album that sees Jordana embrace her innermost feelings alongside a newfound love of the whimsical and abstract. It’s a rich and diverse album of classic songs, playful pop, and illuminating lucidity from an artist ascending to a new level.

“I feel like this is my best record yet,” she says confidently. “It’s my most authentic. I’m really proud of it.” The majority of Jordana’s previous albums were relatively lo-fi, bedroom-created affairs, written and created in her home states of Maryland and Kansas before she found a creative base in New York. 2022’s breakthrough album ‘Face The Wall’ found her turning heads with glistening pop sounds, but ‘Lively Premonition’ is a different kind of breakthrough on both a musical and personal level.

It might feel silly to say that this is a very musical album, considering it’s a collection of lovely sounds and melodies and not a clanging mess of random noises, but it feels right for a record that is ornately and beautifully crafted in a classic pop sensibility. Think of masters like Carole King – people for whom pop and the search for the perfect melody was an art form. “I was heavy into Steely Dan, The Carpenters, Mamas and the Papas, that vintage sound. Back to organic-sounding things,” she smiles.

It’s a record full of pristine musicianship and the feeling that every single note has been immaculately refined yet retains a natural and supremely satisfying organic feeling. “Somebody told me recently that they listened to the record and said it didn’t feel like a loop. It felt like a live room. There aren’t any programmed drums on it.” Jordana has left the bedroom firmly in the rear-view mirror. “As much as I love making pop music and beats and stuff, it can feel a little monotonous. This one, I feel all of the influences came to fruition, and you can really tell. I want more of that intricate placement of little melodies and little parts. No copy-and-paste stuff. We need to make it genuine; we need to make it authentic.”

“I thought I was going to be playing violins in orchestras for a living; then I started listening to indie-rock”

When she was growing up, though, her interests were far removed from the kaleidoscopic world of classic pop. “I thought I was going to be in orchestras,” she explains. “I thought I was going to be playing violins in orchestras for a living.” More on those violins later. “Then I started listening to indie-rock,” she continues. “When I first saw my friend playing violin, I said I wanted to do that, and then I started listening to indie-rock and said, wait, I want to do THAT now. That’s cool. I want to play guitar and be a rock star. I’m a very impulsive person.”

From that indie-rock epiphany, Jordana began her music-making journey using the most rudimentary tools available. “I got a little iPod that had GarageBand on it. I thought I’d get the cheapest thing I could find with GarageBand on it. I didn’t do shit other than school and playing video games,” she laughs. Side note – she still loves video games. “Recently, I just made a repurchase. I found a Nintendo DS. It was a purchase on a whim. I have been wanting to get another DS for a while, and I saw that they had the pastel pink one that I had when I was little. I was like, how much is that? I’m willing to splurge on this. It was in great condition, and it was imported from Japan. It still had a kid’s Japanese name. I hope that it wasn’t taken from her!”

Anyway, back to her journey. “I started bedroom stuff and got a laptop, and did my first record on GarageBand and started flying out to New York and LA to work on stuff.” The bi-coastal push and pull of the two main musical hubs of America, with two distinctly different vibes, began to influence Jordana’s work. “There’s been a pattern with the last few records where I’ll go to the other side of the country for some reason,” she says, again referencing that impulsive nature. “For my second record, I flew to New York for sessions. I was living in Wichita at the time, which is in the Midwest. When I moved to New York, I did a record where I was flying back and forth to LA. Now I live in LA, this record I started before I moved to LA and moved a month into it. I’m flying back and forth. It’s a good method to set an amount of time to really hone in on something and focus on it.”

LA is the spiritual home of ‘Lively Premonition’, with its gorgeous Laurel Canyon vibes and sense of wide-open expanse, sunshine, and glamour. “It is pretty inspiring,” she says. “I hated LA when I first visited here, though. I was still in Wichita; I was flying back and forth and thought this place was so fake and plastic-looking. It’s so annoying. Then I moved to New York, and it was cold, and after a while, I got a little tired and thought, oh, maybe the reason I’m so sad is because I’m tucked away in a dark room all the time. This is a party city, and I’m sober, and I don’t drink. I felt after a while that I didn’t really belong there. I wanted to try the sunshine, but all of a sudden, over a year later, I didn’t realise how quickly it went by.”

Her life in Los Angeles, with that daily injection of serotonin, felt like a better creative environment as Jordana lived with sobriety and self-reflection following the indulgences of her earliest touring days in her musical infancy. “I really like it here. It’s crazy how much weather impacts mental health. It’s always sunny. I feel genuinely happier, honestly,” she says softly. “On certain songs, you can kind of tell. I feel like I’ve taken a breath of fresh air and recalibrated. As much as there are breakup songs, there are a lot of love songs and just goofy stuff on the record.”

The album is imbued with a sense of freedom, optimism, and a refreshing lack of cynicism as Jordana learned how to deal with life events with clarity and hope. “As much as I think that my emotions from terrible circumstances in life can really make great art, I just want to be happy like anyone else,” she explains. “Trust me! I don’t want to let shit make me sad. We all go through bullshit, though. I’ve had some optimism unlocked in past work, but I’ve broken through a new tier of that now. I’ve developed better methods of expression. With writing this record, I had a mini epiphany. I realised I could write about things that aren’t exactly emotional. When I’m in a crazy emotional state, I can zone out of that and write about something else.”

That abstract quality allowed Jordana to write about different themes, feelings, or, indeed, nothing specific at all other than just being alive. It unlocked a different creative spirit within her. “I feel like a writer!” she laughs. “I had nobody I was writing about at that time, and it feels so good. Having the ability to just write about something that’s not going on in your life. Ahh, this is just a made-up story. It’s so great, it’s awesome. Even with love songs: when I was writing love songs like ‘We Get By’, I wasn’t in love with anyone. I am now! There’s a song about going to summer camp. I’ve never gone to summer camp, really; I can pretend I know what it’s like. Yeah, do whatever you want.”

The freedom to completely change the way she wrote songs combined with the freedom she felt to experiment musically as she worked closely alongside producer and multi-instrumentalist Emmett Kai. “He’s like my brother,” she explains. “Working with him is really dumb. We goof out. He’s just so easy to work with, and it’s great working with someone who has the same end goal and vision. We’re both into Laurel Canyon stuff and yacht rock.”

“As much as there are breakup songs, there are a lot of love songs and just goofy stuff on the record”

Some of the musical experimentation brought her right back to her most formative musical experiences. “I’ve just started really putting more violin into my music,” she says excitedly. “I was sort of known when I was growing up to be that girl who’s just incredibly invested in violin.” Violin doesn’t really feel like an instrument you can be anything but invested in if you want to succeed, considering the sheer amount of effort it takes to play it. “It is hard. It’s years of lessons,” says Jordana. “Because I had found something when I discovered I could try my hand at indie-rock and anything other than orchestral things, out of spite, I didn’t really put the violin at the forefront. I don’t know why. I guess I’d just spent so much time with it that it was a case of, what else could I do with this?”

“I had violin on my records in the past, but it wasn’t solo stuff. For the violin solo on ‘We Get By’, I was like, hold on, this feels like this could be in here but should I shorten this? I felt like it was a little too long, but you know what? Nah. We’re going to go fully into this. We’re going to make them sit through a violin solo, and we’ll see how they feel about it. I’m pretty proud of how it turned out.”

‘Lively Premonition’ is a record that contains all the different facets of Jordana’s artistry, or indeed her ‘Multitudes Of Mystery’, as the title of one of the key tracks suggests. “I like these three shifts: the first four tracks being very Laurel Canyon-inspired, the next three in goofy funky mode, and the last three are like, okay, we’re getting into it. We’re getting into this heartbreak outro.” There’s an almost baroque pop quality to the songs that begin the record. Ambitious in scope and rich in stature, they feel like the very definition of a significant step up, while the closing stretch of songs provides an emotional gut punch after you’re lured in by the idiosyncratic experimentation of the more freeform songs.

Let’s talk about those goofy funky tracks for a moment, though, because after these beautifully ornate yacht-rock-tinged pop songs, we move into extreme party mode with a clutch of tracks that illuminate the freewheeling, open-hearted spirit of the album, beginning with the spoken word, party-planning conversation between friends on ‘Multitudes Of Mystery’. “That is an out-of-leftfield surprise. People will not expect that. That was one of the songs that we wanted to push as a single, but the label was like, nah, it’s spoken word; no one’s going to want to listen to us talk,” she laughs.

“That was straight-up goofing off. It was so fun.” On an album full of beautiful orchestral instrumentation, this track contains rather more basic percussion within the hilarious conversation of the song’s protagonists. “That fart is an armpit fart,” she laughs. “I’m actually really good at armpit farting.”

Following on in this party vibe is ‘Raver Girl’, a song that harks back to the non-stop partying of her late teens and early twenties, moving to New York and embracing the chaotic life of the music industry. “That is one of the reasons why I had to stop drinking,” she reflects. “The first tour I was on, I was drunk every night, and it was 50 shows. It was a lot. I felt like shit the next day every time. It was fun, but it enhanced the experience, being carefree and dancing while performing. It’s a challenge to do without anything. I think that it’s a challenge that’s bringing out my true self. I am super energetic. I do get fucking high energy. I do get crazy. Being sober is forcing me to be genuine. It’s cool, honestly. I used to need to know there was alcohol at some place to hang out with friends. I needed this crutch to go outside and have a good time. Now I’m just like, where are we going?? I like caffeine, so I’ll just drink a Red Bull or something, but that just makes me more crazy.”

With all of the clarity Jordana discovered when making this album, she allowed herself not to get consumed by the trauma she had experienced. Previously, the whole album might have been a breakup record. Instead, the songs informed by her breakup are complemented by new themes, new ideas, and new visions, no matter how silly or unserious. “I discovered that I can step outside of any emotional distress I was having and write about something completely different,” she reflects. “I haven’t ever been fully able to do that. I had my process of writing songs; whatever I was going through, that’s all I could focus on, and that’s all I could write about. I never really thought about writing outside of anything I was doing. I was super inspired by Emmett. I was like, we’ve got to make something really good.” The experience of writing ‘Like A Dog’ showed her that anything could be a song. Well, almost anything. “I’m never going to write about food. I don’t want to write about eating something,” she says passionately. Every artist has their red lines.

With less pressure to be conceptual or always convey deep and spiritual meaning in her songs and instead write about dogs, parties, or songs that feature armpit farts and rip-roaring laughter, Jordana found herself with some different fears that all songwriters can relate to. “I wanted to try my hand at generic lyricism,” she says. “Easy listening, but not redoing what somebody else has done. It’s just a challenge. I’m always scared I’m ripping off someone. Sometimes, I’ll send a song to a friend and ask them to tell me if this is a melody from a song that they’ve heard before. It’s happened to me in the past. Somebody said that the vocal melody on one of the songs sounded just like the Shania Twain song ‘You’re Still The One’, and I was like, oh god. Oh no. This is not what I want. I don’t want to be that bitch that is stealing vocal melodies.” There is a fine line, though, on a record where the influences are so clear and, indeed, so enriching. “It’s an unconscious influence,” she says. “I love Hall & Oates, and I try to channel Daryl Hall’s vocals through some of it. There would be something I’d record, and Emmet would be like, no, that sounds too much like you’re trying to be Daryl Hall,” she laughs. “I’d say, yeah, you’re right. I wanna be like my idol! It can’t be too on the nose.”

With an album full of dualities, Jordana was keen to emphasise the fun, carefree side of the album while keeping the introspective beauty of the love songs as something to be discovered in time. “The label wanted to push ‘The One I Knew’, but that one was a little too vulnerable for me,” she reveals. “That was the first song I wrote about the breakup. It was a little too vulnerable to promote that one. I never really thought that would be an issue, but I wanted to choose singles that I would be excited about showing people. I wanted to spotlight them. I’m very proud of these last three songs. I feel like I’ve entered a new creative era. I have more confidence now, and I’m more confident in my songwriting abilities. That’s prevalent in this new work.”

Keen to make the most of this new era, Jordana is more creative and energised than ever before. “Ever since moving to LA and taking trips to New York to record the rest of it, I feel like I’ve never been busier with straight-up making music with new people,” she enthuses. “I have a whole backlog of songs now, way different than the record. I’ve got that. I’ve got songs that I’m proud of.”

Taken from the November 2024 issue of Dork. Jordana’s album ‘Lively Premonition’ is out 18th October.