Recorded after she made peace with ‘ugliness and imperfection’ in music, Horn’s debut album is a skeletal marvel that evokes Yo La Tengo and soft country shuffles
When Jana Horn wrote her song Jordan, she didn’t know what it was about. She had spent two days at her brother’s house following a breakup, ruminating over two chords, when a line came to her: “They called me to Jordan.” She followed the thread. “I had no idea what I was doing, but it felt really important, like I had to finish the story,” she says, calling from the last day of class in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she is a postgrad fiction-writing student and teacher.
It became a five-minute narrative about someone who heeds that call and embarks on the long, trying journey by foot. On arrival, he is instructed to bomb the city where his family lives, but chooses death instead. Horn delivers this potent tale over those two colourless acoustic chords, her affectless, curious delivery evocative of Phil Elverum, or a twilit Laura Marling.
