Essie Jain will make you shiver. No one is immune to what this New York-by-way-of-London-England young lady will do to the skin and the bones. She will make you clutch for your collar or hood to pull it in tighter around your exposed or unexposed surface. It doesn’t matter. Inside or outside, warm or cold, wind or none, Jain will send a bullet of a ripple through all of your layers and the haunting will commence, rattling all that’s moveable and reachable. Jain’s measured and immaculate voice pours over you and dries slowly like melting candle wax, which you can break out of, but it feels better to just wear that windbreaker of a plastic coat. She insulates you and could make a racing heart come to a screeching halt, calming it down with ladles of coos and a starkness that still spreads its wings out to give an impressive picture of vast, vast space. Her first full-length record We Made This Ourselves gives that haunting or any haunting a good name, as it has a general feeling of being way too close to you – reading your thoughts, knowing your untold secrets, kissing you on the mouth, combing through your hair, putting its hand upon your knee and staring, just fucking staring at you with that look. But it’s not bad that it does all of these things. It’s never intimidating. It’s as if an immediate trust was formed between Jain and yourself – somewhere in another time period where she feels comfortable talking to you the way she does and you feel all the same listening to these personal-sounding issues. (There’s nothing more unsettling than having someone spill their guts and hearts to you when you’re not expecting it or will to make the investment.) She’s going to sing about things you never knew you were thinking and she’s going to do it with a pristine sense of less is more that lands you hook, line and sinker, pulling you from the waters and into the boat just so a good look attcha can be had. She turns us inward as she turns herself inward and inside out to make a startling piece of art that could be placed in a meadow, set to play and in a short amount of time, forest critters would be gathered around it, sitting Indian style and just reflecting themselves on the emoting going on, able in some instinctual way to connect with the vibrations. If you look quickly, the moose and the Kodiak bear were both brushing tears away from their furry cheeks, affected as they were by the unshakable sincerity.

1. NO FIREARMS ALLOWED IN HOMETOWN FOODS
This was a sign posted on the doorway of a grocery store in Kansas. We had stopped the van for a snack break on tour, and needless to say, after seeing that, I wasn’t at all excited about buying their local apple juice.

2. SHOES FOR $8 AND CANDLESTICKS FOR 25 CENTS
I’m not sure I ever fully understood the concept of New York shopping extortion until I bought the items above, for these prices, while browsing out of town.

3. THE WONDER OF A MACROBIOTIC MEAL
I went to a restaurant in Austin that was supposedly going to nourish my entire body in one shot. It turned out to be true, and I came out of that place feeling like I had been injected with joy.

4. RANDOM DOGS AND CATS
I have met many nice ones recently.

5. SLEEPING
There are some weeks out of each year, where you just really enjoy having a good nap. This week was one of them.

Essie Jain Official Site
Ba Da Bing Records