photo credit: Autumn de Wilde
“There’s a need to keep writing even after you finish a record,” says Jenny about the downtime that followed the occasionally tumultuous recording of More Adventurous, “but it’s taken me some years to feel confident writing alone. Now I realize the privacy behooves my songwriting. I was more relaxed and worked on these songs at my leisure.” Still, even with a bevy of “private” songs cluttering up the corners of her brain (“they were slightly more sedate, more word-focused”), Jenny had no plans to release or even record the lot of them. It took a Bright Eye-d friend to convince her otherwise. “I didn’t even consider making a solo record until Conor [Oberst] asked me a couple of years ago,” she laughs. “He said he was starting a label, Team Love, and he’d love for me to make a record for it.” In keeping with the loose origins of the project, recording was also a catch-as-catch-can affair, done in between press and performance obligations for Rilo Kiley.