Jost describes her song, “Vertical World,” as being, “very bombastic,” and says it elicits a lot of toe tapping from her audience. If the fact that she makes up a language for “Jump,” is not enough to convince you that Jost will go to places where few are brave enough to go, to find inspiration for her songs, then wait until you hear the story behind “Vertical World.”
“The song started when someone I know in Atlanta Georgia sent me a postcard with a peach on it. The peach had hands, legs and a little face. I was sitting at the keyboards at the time and there was a sub line that came into my head. I didn’t know what it was for, but it just kept knocking. Often a line like that gets discarded, but it can be the key to the song,” she says, once she finally stops laughing, from my teasing her about her sources for inspiration.
Jost says, “The content of “Vertical World,” is really focused on New York
City, about living here, and the excitement of living here (right on cue
sirens start to wail in the background) It is about how small you are in the
(midst) of the whole thing. It is about the various postures that people
assume to survive (the sirens get louder). The song is meant to poke some fun,
and at the same time (she then digresses) You can hear the vertical wall sound
effects out the window here (referencing the sirens) On the one hand the song
is really cajoling, and on the other hand, the line about the writing on the
wall is serious. People come to urban places or move to places to quest or
look for something. There’s this (she quotes the chorus), “New questions,
pictures, places / Moods unfinished, find yourself saying things / New
questions, pictures, places / Vertical world.” It is about everything that
is unfinished. It is like the survival of the fittest.”
While “Vertical World,” is a song about making adjustments and learning to cope with life in the Big Apple (even if it was inspired by a peach), the song “Awake In My Dream,” is quite different. “The song is really intense. In families, there are a lot of patterns throughout the generations. There are possibilities and restrictions. The song is meant to be dreamy. I drop beats and things, and in the verses, I drop to three beats instead of four. I didn’t want it to be linear. “Awake In My Dream,” literally means watching myself dream, but it is also about being awake in my view and my hope. It is lucid dreaming and lucid wakefulness. That is what I am after with that song,” says Jost.
Talking
cheerily and at an up-tempo pace, Jost theorizes as to why people are drawn to
her music, “I think that I have an advantage, because people love the cello.
When people pick up a guitar (she is also a guitarist), there is that first
chord and you know what is going to happen, but with the cello they are
asking, ‘What is going to happen now?’ The cello is also a beautiful sounding
instrument, with which people are enamoured, by the time you are finished
tuning it.”
“I grew up on classical music and that was where I was headed, but I always found it difficult, because in classical music you have to behave in a certain way. (We share a laugh when I suggest, don’t you just hate that?) Playing the cello came very early, because different members of my family play string instruments, and we would play quartets and trios in our living room, sometimes (she is laughing), to greater effect and sometimes to lesser effect. I had these cello lines that were more like bass lines, and I got bored, so I started to create another line singing. I tried to come up with something that wasn’t written for all of the other parts. That is where that started for me,” Jost says in explaining her transformation from a classically trained cellist, to an artist with well-crafted alternative folk rock tunes.
For those readers in New York City you can catch Serena Jost at Barbes, in Brooklyn, on July 10th, you can also dial into WKHZ, a station which recently has been airing some of Jost’s new songs.
Photo by Todd Chalfant Photography ©
May 2008
Click here for printer friendly article
