Photo by Rebecca Lewis
Jaymay
Common sources of inspiration create uncommonly literate anti-folk music
By Jennifer Kelly
Published: March 21st, 2008 | 2:01pm
Be careful what you play for precocious children.
Future anti-folk star Jaymay was 10 when she heard her first Bob Dylan song, “Highway 61.” She was already playing piano and violin and was an avid bookworm. She hadn’t committed to becoming a songwriter herself yet, and she had no sense of how important this song would be in shaping her life. “I didn’t know who Bob Dylan was. I didn’t know that he was the person that everyone regarded as the best songwriter of all time,” she says. “But what struck me, even before the lyrics, was the music.”
When she was older, once she’d begun to write songs herself, Jaymay began to appreciate Dylan’s knotty, complicated wordplay. As a tweener, though, she was transfixed by a song that seemed different from anything she’d ever heard. “I mean, I was 10. So I really got into him at the age of 10 and I was collecting everything,” she says.
It wasn’t just Dylan, either. Through the violin, she received an early introduction to classical composers, learning, for instance, how Vivaldi conjured the seasons without a word of lyrics. Jaymay spent endless hours as a babysitter in front of Disney movies, memorizing the playful romanticism of songs from The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. And she wrote and she played, all the way through school, right into college, without ever mustering the courage to perform live.
Then in 2003, with college out of the way, Jaymay stood up at her first open-mic in the East Village. Since then, she’s made two home-recorded yet sophisticated albums, a delicate three-song EP, and her new full-length. The album, “Autumn Fallin”, views a single difficult relationship through the prism of 10 jazzy, folksy songs. All are set in against the unmistakable backdrop of New York City, and all bear the aura of changing urban seasons.
Her touchstones? Again, Dylan and Vivaldi. Dylan’s “Ballad in Plain D,” to her, set the standard for urbanized tales of romantic trouble. “It’s one of my favorite songs,” Jaymay says. “It’s about a breakup he had with his girlfriend and the girl he was living with in the West Village, and just how narrative it is, I think that’s a big portion of it, just a few chords and the storytelling, that’s a song I always, always go back to.”
Vivaldi, on the other hand, inspired her to incorporate the seasons into songs, not just in the lyrical imagery but in their sound and feel. “I remember learning ‘The Four Seasons,’ and basically being taught that he made the sound of winter, and there are no words or explanation,” Jaymay says. “Living in New York City, there’s no way to avoid the transition of the seasons. That’s when I started writing my record and really taking myself seriously as a songwriter — there was no way to avoid writing about the seasons.” Her song “Hard to Say” is a four-part poem, with verses about spring, summer, fall, and winter.
Jaymay writes poetry as well as songs and says that her fondest dream is to have a poem published in The New Yorker. (She’s posted a rejection slip from the magazine on her Web site.) Still the process of writing lyrics and writing poem is fundamentally different. “When I write a song, usually simultaneously music happens. It’s basically improv. I sit down with an instrument and improvise, and then the song starts to come. It just evolves into a song,” she says. “When I write poems, it’s literally like I’m writing and I don’t hear music.”
Issue #35
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