Jennifer O’Connor

April 28, 2008 at 4:11 pm (Uncategorized)

I found Jennifer O’Connor on NPR. I was killing time one afternoon surfing past episodes of World Cafe and came across her interview. After listening to the songs she played and to what she had to say about life and music, I immediately bought her album Over the Mountain, Across the Valley and Back to the Stars.

O’Connor’s sound is unique, a mix of folk, blues and rock, and her voice is clean and full of emotion. Her perspective is fresh, but there is a hint of an old soul. I’m always a sucker for an old soul.

While I don’t discount the ability of all songs to tell some kind of story, I often find that I am not able to connect with music because I cannot identify with their stories. O’Connor’s stories are interesting and intellectual, and her voice allowed me to feel her stories on a variety of levels.

In Dirty City Blues, she says “If the microphone is broken I will scream in the street – I will love you like the woodpecker can only love the tree – I feel the wasted afternoon trying to clamp its teeth in me – I’m going to try now – I’ll try now to be free.” It spoke to the voice in my head that realizes I am about to turn thirty and is afraid that I have already lived all I can live. That fear, it’s trying to clamp its teeth in me. I acknowledge it, and regardless of whether O’Connor is acknowledging a similar fear, she knows that feeling.

In A Complicated Rhyme, again I was able to connect the lyrics to that grand journey of life. “A morning spent on your own – With too much coffee and a telephone – You navigate the lapse – Between what’s coming and what has passed – A complicated rhyme – A bumpy ride through space and time.” Oh, how many of those mornings I have had, energizing my brain with coffee and cigarettes trying to figure out how to make it all make sense. This particular song also lends itself to the memory of relationships passed and time spent replaying every word only to find the answer to “where did it go wrong?” is completely obvious.

Though she is only 23, you get the sense that O’Connor has a vast reservoir of experiences at her disposal. Whether her experiences are many or few, she does a fabulous job of translating them into beautiful melodies that are on a level anyone can understand. I think this is part of her gift. Her music transcends barriers of age, gender and belief, making her music marketable on every level.

By strumming her own guitar and keeping the tunes simple, she only adds to the intrigue. Instead of cluttering the listeners mind with complicated riffs and loud instruments, every sound perfectly compliments her words. Each song is a poem set to music.

O’Connor sings of things universal; emotions and experiences that everyone can understand. And she does it beautifully, soulfully and originally.