Jenny Gillespie - Cure for Dreaming (2016)

Jenny Gillespie has recorded several albums acting as both producer and artist. She blends folk, electronica, jazz, and pop into a constantly regenerating style but one anchored by her smoky, far-ranging voice, and searching, imaginative lyrics.

Her last album Chamma which she recorded entirely in her house in Chicago was named one of the top 25 albums of 2014 by Billboard Magazine. It featured Emmett Kelly (Bonnie Prince Billy) on guitar and Joe Adamik (Califone, Iron and Wine) on drums. Her newest album Cure for Dreaming was recorded in fall 2015 in Los Angeles, CA, engineered by Paul Bryan and arranged by Jenny and Paul. Featuring musicians such as Paul Bryan (Aimee Mann), drummer Jay Bellerose (Robert Plant and Allison Krauss’ Raising Sand), guitarist Chris Bruce (Meshell Ndgeocello), guitarist Gerry Leonard (David Bowie), and pedal steel player Greg Leisz (Lucinda Williams, Bon Iver), the album blends an earnest folk sensibility with experimental flavorings of progressive jazz and sunny sixties and seventies R&B flavored pop.

The songs span a variety of landscapes, from the Venice boardwalk with its “chakra hucksters” in "Pain Travels," to a woman’s solitary spiritual rebirth on the banks of an East Coast river in “Dhyana by the River.” Themes of motherhood, marriage, spirituality and dying enter into the music but through the medium of playful, imagistic and conversational language. Characters weave in and out of the songs, such as the brooding loner drawn to the masculine expressions of his ancestry of “Part Potawatomi,” or the cheerful artist facing death in “Last Mystery Train.” The music is loose, warm, and memorable, yet pulls off an undercurrent of occasional instrumental and melodic wildness not often found in modern day pop. Jenny now divides her time between San Francisco and Big Sur, CA with her husband and son.