Scheinman was born into a family of musicians who homesteaded a foggy bluff
above the Pacific Ocean on the western most edge of the continental United
States. Music and song were part of the landscape. From her parents she
learned the old-timey songs, from her teachers “in town” she learned
classical violin and piano, and from local bands at the Grange Hall (about
thirty minutes away) she was introduced to country classics made famous
by artists such as Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, George Jones and Dolly Parton.
She left home as a teenager and, through her early twenties, rambled around
various cities before putting down roots on the eastern seaboard in Brooklyn,
NY. The lyric of the opening Bob Dylan cover says as much: “I was young
when I left home, An’ I been out a-ramblin’ round, An’ I
never wrote a letter to my home...” Since arriving in her adopted home
in 1999, she developed a close-knit musical community, and later grew into
her own as a singer, holding weekly residencies at the Living Room on Manhattan’s
Lower East Side (often backed by Norah Jones and The Handsome Band) and
at Barbes in Brooklyn.
The vocal album came about organically from these experiences. Scheinman
is of the lineage of female country singers whose strength lies in the reality
and plainspoken honesty they bring to love and life. These are the anti-coquettes,
the women who sing about love and longing but also about changing diapers
and feeding the chickens; singers like Hazel Dickens, Loretta Lynn, Bonnie
Raitt, and Lucinda Williams. Whereas the mental image for Crossing The Field
was of a tribe trekking across a weathered terrain, the image for her vocal
album was a photograph: “An old friend from home sent me a photo a
year or so ago that I kept on my wall while we were making this recording.
It’s of a woman from the valley whose pick-up truck had broken down
on the Wildcat, the long winding road that leads from the highway to home.
She’s standing in the billowing steam of her overheated engine in a
bright red dress and rain boots, and harnessed in the back of the pickup,
inexplicably, is a huge inflatable heart strapped down with bailing twine.”
Jenny Scheinman was recorded in as rootsy an environment as one could find
in Brooklyn: straight to eight-track analog tape at the home studio of Tony
Scherr. Known for his rough-around-the-edges aesthetic, Scherr is a longtime
regular sideman to Frisell and has worked as a bass player and guitarist
for many of the great singers of our time including Feist, Norah Jones,
Willie Nelson, Ani DiFranco, Marianne Faithfull and Rickie Lee Jones. The
songs on Jenny Scheinman live in four different sonic rooms: the early band
tracks, the early duos, the austere acoustic, and the layered productions.
The early duos and band tracks were all recorded live as first takes, with
tons of bleed, no overdubs, no fixing--in other words, strictly old school.
This gives them a confidence and integrity rare among the contemporary protooled,
pitch-corrected mainstream. They are visceral and brave and not afraid to
embrace their own slip-ups.
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