It was getting late when Jennifer O’Connor and her bassist and most awesomeist friend Arabella Kauffmann pulled up in the Matador recording artist’s station wagon mobile. She was right on time – seven bells on this late July evening – and so were her songs, meeting the humid, salmon-colored sky head-on. It was quiet and the two travelers were completing the most diehard drive of any Daytrotter visitor yet – 10 hours straight from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. That’s not a drive. That’s work and some overtime. It was all O’Connor behind the wheel for those 10 hours too as Kauffmann doesn’t have a driver’s license, pleading that she lives in New York and simply doesn’t need one. So Jennifer came into the studio with stiff legs, but as anyone that’s ever seen her play knows, her outward demeanor of cool collection is a mirage. Or maybe what it is is actually a very precise decoy to divert your ears only to the words and the heavenly melodies that are coming out of her mouth, just below her dark brown bangs. It’s like when someone gets you to look as a frantically waving hand and then they knock you one right in the stomach or the eggs. It’s a tactic that usually works. She plays so softly that you’re afraid to shift at all, even a centimeter, in your seat because it would be a distraction as monstrous as a piano crashing through the roof of an art gallery or a meditation center. Your intent is to take it all in as if you genuinely thought a quiz would be popped later on post-performance. Were that to happen, you by golly, would be ready because O’Connor could make anyone a great test taker if the subject was her music and what goes into it. It’s partly the redemption of pleasantries from bleak cave-ins. And it’s partly the sentimental bliss that she gives to all of her songs, reaching for the snowy peaks of even the crummiest of situations, attaining that quarter-smile as the tears are still being choked on and still staining a cheek. We heard all of it. It was like we were there for all of it. – Sean Moeller

Jennifer O’Connor gives us a run-through of the four songs she rang through before heading off to the hotel a block away and passing out from exhaustion. She never made it to the pool she was so excited about when she left the studio. If you look closely, her answers will appear in standardized quotation marks.

First song
Dirty City Blues (Jennifer O'Connor) [3.48MB] [3648 downloads]


– original version appears on “Over The Mountain, Across the Valley and Back to the Stars”
“People always think this is a love song…but it’s not, it’s about my sister. She was sick and the song is kind of a collection of memories and me trying to talk myself into having a positive attitude about her sickness. A friend told me that I just had to believe that it was all going to be OK. And this was kind of my way of trying to do that.”

Second song
Tonight We Ride (Jennifer O'Connor) [3.92MB] [3590 downloads]


—original version appears on “Over The Mountain, Across the Valley and Back to the Stars”
“This is a song about a lot of things, really—myself, my girlfriend at the time, our love, our lives together, our struggles as individuals, etc. But again, it’s very hopeful.”

Third song
Century Estates (Jennifer O'Connor) [2.01MB] [3299 downloads]


—original version appears on “Over The Mountain, Across the Valley and Back to the Stars”
“This is the last song that I wrote for the record and the title is culled from it. These are probably my favorite lyrics that I’ve written yet.”

Fourth song
I'll Bring You Home (Jennifer O'Connor) [3.11MB] [3799 downloads]


—original version appears on “Over The Mountain, Across the Valley and Back to the Stars”
“This is another song about my sister. It’s basically a song TO her. I wanted her to know how much I loved her and how I would do anything to I could to help. And that’s it,
really.”

Jennifer O’Connor
Matador Records

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