"So a few weeks ago, I got a note from my pal Jonathan Bitz, who was raving about Jen Korte & the Loss's new record. In his succinct, inimitable, articulate style, he told me everything I needed to know about the album in the expanse of just five words: "absolutely beautiful. restrained. spacious. dynamic." I trust Jonathan's sensibilities implicitly, mainly because our tastes so often overlap. Needless to day, I've been absolutely dying to hear the disc for myself ever since. As luck would have it, Korte stopped by last night with a few copies of her forthcoming self-titled release. Color me impressed! Jonathan's assessment was -- unsurprisingly -- spot on. Only I'd add mature, alluring, impassioned, lush and provocative to his list of adjectives. ...but I simply couldn't resist giving you the tiniest of peeks -- a, ahem, fleeting glimpse, as it were, of "Fleeting," my favorite track from the record, which features Korte throwing down an F-bomb with a confident, sure-handed expressiveness and believability not heard since Ryan Adams on "Come Pick Me Up." - Dave Herrera, Music Editor for the Denver Westword.
Everything I write about is something I can't have or something that I did have or didn't get," says Jen Korte, explaining the significance of her band's name, the Loss. "It's cool. I'm fine with the fact that I write sad songs. I'm fine with the fact that I write love songs. I'm not a political writer; I'm not a political person. If I could be out there writing really fucking fun dance rock, I would. If I could be writing Explosions in the Sky melodic instrumentals, I would."
While it may seem odd to hear Korte name-check a band like Explosions in the Sky, that group's instrumental rock served as an early inspiration for the now-27-year-old singer-songwriter. Korte started playing guitar when she was eighteen, when a metal-head named Jordan (who wore Slayer T-shirts and "smelled like cigarettes and rock and roll all the time") gave her an old classical guitar with three strings and a chord book. At first she was playing loud rock, but after seeing the Austin-based Explosion in small dive bars, she began trying to write more intricate guitar parts. Eventually, the intricacy gave way to intimacy, in the form of more contemplative songs with confessional lyrics along the lines of Ani DiFranco and Mazzy Star, who also served as early influences. Four years ago, Korte followed a girlfriend out to Denver, and when things didn't work out between the two of them, she stayed behind and dealt with the breakup by drinking and writing songs....That dark period inspired eight of the dozen songs that make up Korte's gorgeous, self-titled full-length, which, as she puts is, has "a little bit of makeout music, a little bit of crying music and a little bit of rock...While Korte might not be afraid to expose her feelings through her album's songs, which started off as poems or letters, at times there's a charcoal-tinged fragility in her vocal delivery. When she pairs with Jessica DeNicola, who's been in the Loss the longest, the two vocalists make some truly divine music together, especially on "Fleeting" and "Shoreline," in which Korte sings, "I've been drinking too much of you lately...Korte's also noticeably come into her own as an artist. A fan of Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Otis Redding, Harry Belafonte (Swing Dat Hammer is one of her favorite albums) and the blues of Robert Johnson, John Lee Hooker and Bessie Smith, she's taken all of her various influences and melded them into an alluring, distinctive sound all her own..." -Jon Solomon, Denver Westword.
"It has taken us over a year to get it right. The first time around, we did it in the very customary way of tracking the drums and bass first and then trying to add everything. I just could not connect with it as a whole at all. It was a very different record than the one we are putting out. I decided to scrap most of it and start over. The second time around, we played almost the entire thing in two or three sessions live."
Korte is a musical late-comer. Growing up an hour from Austin, Korte spent a lot of time there checking out the music scene, but her background was theater. "And, aside from being a dramatic child (in every sense of the word), I wrote poetry. Went to a ton of poetry reading clubs from around twelve on. I had a few published when I was very young. Did slams in Austin."
Her first real music experience was in college. She took a course called, "Rock Band Ensemble." "They put me in the lead singer spot in the beginners band. It was totally humiliating and great at the same time."
She played a bit in Austin as part of a "loud rock trio," came to Denver for a couple of months, and decided to stay. She started with local open mics. But she didn't find her musical style ("someone said I sound like Janis Joplin and Nick Drake's love child") until teaming up with her current band. "I had to strip down and start over. In one month, I wrote half of the material on here. I just hit a point and it started spewing out of me." What also helped was finding the right players. "Then I felt like I could put the movement into the songs because I had the instruments to back me."
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