About Me
"This album of 40 minutes is absolutely perfect, a bedside album so pleasant to listen to after a hard day. At once accessible and challenging . . . a perfectly balanced album . . . filled with memorable melodies. A debut full of promise!"
-Sabine de Greef, withmusicinmymind.blogspot.com
"Debut albums sometimes can offer a false look at what's to come in the future from an artist, but for Jenny Gillespie it was just the opposite. She spent time to find herself musically before presenting this album to the public. This is a great album that offers a tranquil, relaxed quality to it that I think everyone can use at some point or another and is well worth a spin." -Guestlist Magazine
Jenny Gillespie continues to weave and bloom her dreamy, intricate songs on her new album Light Year. Light Year is the bridge between Jenny’s earlier folk-pop leanings and the new darker, more honest direction she finds herself working towards.
Fans of Feist, Laura Marling, Martha Wainwright, and Sun Kil Moon will gravitate to this album, instrumented thoughtfully by world percussion, pedal steel, accordian, and more, but with the insistent thread of Jenny's inventively tuned guitar, piano, and a broken-angelic voice that heightens and speaks unabashedly to the listener's emotions.
Born in 1980 in rural central Illinois, Jenny first picked up her mother’s 1972 baby Martin guitar and wrote her first song at thirteen, after years of piano lessons and singing in the church choir. Her childhood was spent in the woods, sailing a lot on a lake, and making movies with her sister, including some very funny, earnest music video remakes of Wilson Phillips and Indigo Girls. Her mother is a landscape painter who played Nanci Griffith, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen in her studio—artists who became lodged in Jenny’s musical psyche. Her father is a jazz and bebop fan who loved to croon along to Chet Baker, the fluid, joyful melody of his voice also soldered to her vocal DNA. The house was always full of music and art-making, and Jenny and her sister were encouraged to sing, write, paint, and act.
Jenny spent college at the University of Virginia and graduate school at the University of Texas studying poetry writing. In Austin, between classes, she recorded her first EP, Love and Ammunition with singer/songwriter Lee Simmons as producer. In 2004 Jenny moved to Chicago. She wrecked her car within the first week, which was a blessing because, walking around the Wicker Park neighborhood where she lived she began to write new melodies that would become her first album.
Throughout her first few years in Chicago, Jenny met new musician friends to work with and befriended engineers at Electrical Audio and Carterco Recording. It was within this new circle of friends that her album Light Year was created, and perhaps as a result the performances and arrangements on the album are more comfortable and natural than Jenny’s previous recordings. Light Year features John Knecht on percussion, Adam Ollendorff (Madi Diaz, Cracklin’ Moth) on pedal steel, Alan Scalpone (The Bitter Tears) and singer/songwriter Aimee Bobruk. Light Year was partly funded by donations from fans.
Jenny is currently finishing up a batch of songs for a new record entitled “Hearts for Eyesâ€. Her biggest musical influences on her new songs are the artists Talk Talk, Bon Iver, Will Oldham, and Joanna Newsom. As she continues to grow as an artist, Jenny hopes her next record, and each one that follows, will move her into her truest, most authentic artistic space—somewhere between the darker, poetic folk she loves, and the earthy, emotionally-driven yet thoughtful songwriting she’s known for.
View Jenny Gillespie's EPK
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