Hotel Café Tour: Jenny Owen Youngs

By Naila Francis
Published: November 7th, 2008 | 2:10pm

"One bus, one band and a bunch of friends on the road." It's the tag line to what has become one of the most successful singer-songwriter tours of the last few years. And this time around, the Hotel Café Tour is giving it up to the women. Launched by that now venerable Hollywood venue with a reputation for breaking new talent, the tour has been throwing together headliners and local emerging singer-songwriters for the last four years, showcasing their music as much as the convivial atmosphere that the café is known for on jaunts across the United States and the United Kingdom. This year's tour, kicking off October 9 in Santa Barbara, California, features 18 of the most promising new female voices (including a few familiar favorites) to hit their stage in recent times.

"There are so many tours where it's a bunch of guys and this was an opportunity to show an area where females are dominating the current market," says tour co-founder Josh Neuman. "We wanted to bring diverse artists together from many different cultural and musical backgrounds. It's always exciting to see how people will get along out there and what collaborations come from it."

In this series running throughout the duration of the tour, which concludes November 18 in Los Angeles (check thehotelcafetour.com for dates, tickets, and more on the featured artists at each venue), Venuszine.com puts the spotlight on the women who've caught our ear and the reasons we think you should tune in to them, too.

Jenny Owen Youngs

Age: 26

Home base: Brooklyn

Pick up: Batten the Hatches, re-released last year on Canadian indie Nettwerk after a 2005 self-release

Sound: Heart-wrenching indie pop spiked with country, folk, and orchestral elements — and, oh yeah, a touch of the sardonic

Fair warning: An album that is deceptively easy on the ears, despite a few hazy electronic gurgles, Batten the Hatches nonetheless boasts trenchant lyrics of relationship failings and dysfunctional extremes with characters who struggle to rise above their anger and pain. It’s a glum, occasionally biting brew alluded to in the album’s title: “It’s a nautical phrase that means when you’re about to enter rough waters. I like words and I wanted to find the exact, right, perfect ones,” says Youngs of the title. “The writing period for all of that material was very tumultuous, and, hopefully, people will interpret it as a reflection on the material. Maybe if I had battened my hatches previous to engaging in all the situations that led to all that stuff, I would have been better prepared.”

Fair warning #2: It’s the song that’s perhaps garnered the most attention, having appeared in the second season premiere of Showtime’s Weeds. But “Fuck Was I,” a smart, catchy nod to the clear-eyed sanity that often emerges, unfortunately, post-break up, also points to Youngs’ spunk and authenticity. “Sometimes there are some situations where you can’t do anything but curse; it’s just gotta happen,” she says. “It can be an excellent release, even if it doesn’t accomplish anything. It’s a way for people to get some of their venom out of their system without causing any damage to anyone.”

Unending obsession: Among the quirks that Youngs giddily flaunts is her adoration of sharks, which she admits began when she was about 9 after reading a book about a diver who spent time in their company. Subsequently obsessed with Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, she initially planned on being a marine biologist. “The truth of the matter is, science — we never really got along,” she says. “It became very clear around that point that I needed to do something creative …. [But] I just think [sharks] are fucking bad-ass predators and they’re not taking any prisoners and we could all probably learn something from them.”

Under the influence: “Drinking Song” was added as a bonus track to the re-release of Batten the Hatches, but even before that, the jaunty “Coyote” painted a less sunny look at alcohol’s fogging effects. “I titled that song before it was done being written. Coyote is a reference to the phrase ‘Coyote Ugly,’ and the phrase is actually really interesting. It refers to when you go on a bender and you wake up; if a coyote gets trapped in an ankle snapper, it will chew its own leg off to escape,” says Youngs. “If you’re wasted and you take somebody home — and at the time it seemed like a good idea, but you’re looking through eight pairs of beer goggles — you would rather chew your own arm off than wake them up when you’re trying to leave the next morning.”

BFFs in the making: “I imagine the whole thing will be a very Spice Girls–girl power kind of deal, and I hope that I get to be Sporty,” says Youngs of the Hotel Café Tour. “I feel pretty good knowing that no matter what, someone will always have a tampon I can borrow …. And I look forward to braiding everyone else’s hair until we become BFFs.”
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Jenny Owen Youngs MySpace