I’ll try and keep this as short as possible. Not because I don’t have anything to say about Nick Jaina the singer—whose eloquent, tempered, and downright gorgeous new album, A Narrow Way, will be celebrated this week—but because I’d like Nick Jaina the writer to have his say as well.
But first, on A Narrow Way: Released on local labels Hush (via CD) and Jealous Butcher (via fancy 180-gram LP), the album opens with “A Narrow Way,” which unfolds like a dog-eared glove compartment map, with various locales highlighted alongside traditional refrains (“I never missed the water until the well ran dry”) and more than a few sharp pangs of regret. Other standouts include the jazz-heavy shuffle of “That’s the Kind of Fruit You Leave on the Vine,” and the wounded confessional “Winding Sheet,” in which a somber Jaina softly admits, “If there was a pill that could make this go away/Don’t you think I’d take that goddamn pill every day?”
MERCURY: From The Bluff of All Time to The 7 Stations, and now through Wool and the new record, your songwriting seems to be improving with each album you release. As a writer, how important is it to constantly be evolving with each new recording?
JAINA: Well, it’s extremely important. It’s everything. For me, the quest to be a better writer and the quest to be a better person are intertwined. Being a writer is a life pursuit and it ends with me years from now being lowered into my grave and thinking to myself, “Damn, I was just starting to get good….”
It’s hard to know if the songwriting is improving. From my perspective, I just know whether or not I said something that I wanted to say. I know that the trappings around the songs are improving: I have a better band now, and we do better arrangements; the production on the recordings has improved; I’m a better singer. I don’t think the songwriting has improved as drastically as those other things have, but they all have [come with] the benefit of making the songs sound better.
If you count the reissue of 7 Stations, that makes three Nick Jaina albums released in 2008. Do you think being so active as a singer is paramount to surviving off your craft?
I don’t have any interest in being prolific for its own sake, but I certainly like to finish things and move on. And I’m not really that prolific, I’m just good at appearing to be prolific. Besides, I feel like I could’ve done a lot more this year if I hadn’t spent so much time sitting around feeling sorry for myself.
I noticed in your recent tour journals that it seems as if the band does better (financially) when you busk than compared to when you perform inside clubs?
The busking thing has been a complete surprise to me. It’s temperamental, but not nearly as temperamental as performing in clubs has been. On one hand, we’re completely dependent on the weather and the police, two factors that are out of our control. But on the other hand sometimes the walls of a venue manage to keep out people who normally would enjoy hearing our music but who just don’t know that we exist. We know that if we find the right place on the street and there are enough people there, we can set up and play and people will stop and listen and enjoy it. And as a promotional tool for the club shows, it’s been by far the most reliable way to get people to come see us play. More effective than emails, posters… even press, I’m sorry to say.
Nick Jaina performs at the Doug Fir on Sunday, November 16.