FRESH WIND SESSION No. 34
Jennica Tamler and Dry Lightning
Recording Dates: 17 October 2024
KNCE 93.5 FM Premiere: 20 October 2024
Substack Premiere: 14 November 2024
This Fresh Wind session differs from the first 33, in that it contains the music of two different artists. Rather than being a document of one artist’s process, it’s more of a portrait of two musical friends and the way their artistic worlds converge and diverge. The artists Jennica Tamler and Dry Lightning were passing through New Mexico on a tour in October, and stopped by my Heartbreak Hotel Studio together - recording songs on their own and also in tandem over the course of an afternoon.
I first encountered Jennica Tamler’s music last year, when she reached out to me about playing at one of the Sunset Series shows at Ennui Gallery as part of a DIY tour she was booking at the time. She had sent me a YouTube video of her performing her original song “Just Like You”, and by the time I finished listening to the song I was pretty blown away. A heartfelt ode to her mother that interrogates ancestral body shame, I was thrilled that she chose to include a version of it at this session a year after the show at Ennui Gallery.
Both Tamler and Dry Lightning originally hail from Pittsburgh, PA, and their lives have intersected in various eras and places. Though they once were both part of a Godsmack cover band that lives on as a set of matching tattoos, I found their current musical styles to be very different. While Tamler’s songs tend to be emotionally based, evoking singers like Conor Oberst and early-Sharon Van Etten, Dry Lightning’s cerebral songs instead called to mind projects like the Mountain Goats and The Get Up Kids - with a touch of musical theater.
Listeners to the session will first hear five original songs from Tamler (“Sorrow”, “Residue”, “Rotten”, “Never Home”, and “Just Like You”) followed by five original songs from Dry Lightning (“Flag Of Convenience”, “Boiling The Flute”, “Ghost Chorus”, “Orson’s Blues”, and “Calypso”). The session then closes with a cover of the Deer Tick song “Dirty Dishes” sung as a duet.
A note to listeners: there is an intermittent audio issue present in parts of this Fresh Wind session that is only audible on soundsystems with a subwoofer. I was unable to remove this issue, so I recommend listening with your subwoofer unattached (or, just on your phone). Thank you for understanding!
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