JoAnna Lynne

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Okay, so I'm having serious trouble reviewing this in a clever, quotable way so, as one of JoAnna's card carrying top 5 fans, let me just drop a tangent on you. I effing love this record. Jo and I have spent countless hours in Boston coffeehouses or sprawled across municipal lawns arguing the finer points of lyric writing, and in my awkwardly verbose nature we have traded hundreds of pages worth of emails on the subject, even if that quantity is weighted heavily in my favor. Tracks like "Closer To You" and "Shut Out The Lights" clearly demonstrate her intuitive storytelling, single lines filling out the scene like a deliberate pan across the room before settling on the action.

But lets get down to why I keep coming back to listen to JoAnna, and it's not because we're friends. Jo sings from the gut in a way that is almost unsettling for such an unassuming little girl. She's goofy, skinny as a rail, and can't weigh more than a buck o' five, but start her singing and she blows down houses like a hungry wolf. Yeah, she can ball you up on the floor when she sings:



I turn the key, make a wish, flip the switch
Is this all that there is, is this it?
And I slide down the apartment door
I'm alone. Nothing to go home for any more.


But she doesn't need the power of a strong lyric to empty your last box of kleenex. Wait till she hit's the chorus in "Christina" and just repeats that name over and over again. I even knew what was coming on this song, I probably read down 10 drafts of it as she filled a small collection of notebooks trying to finish it, but I still wasn't prepared for the impact the first time I finally heard it. Even on the 20th listen it's still leveling. When she hits that first B in the chorus and lets it drag just a moment before breaking into vibrato, you can hear the microphone begging to redline, you can hear the dimensions of the room, and you can hear the frustrated cry of a woman who has entirely let go. - Brian Hull

Watch the news broadcast of JoAnna Performing her music to a city pile driver for a news story on WTKR News Channel 3!
Copy and paste the link below into your browser!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCWtU3YEe9Y

- WTKR News Channel 3 Mike Mather

JOANNA LYNNE
This beach folk vocalist performs shoeless and says she's no background singer.

"I'm an attention whore," JoAnna Lynne said. "I don't like to play at bars where people are just there to drink." She shared this and more with Link.

Learning the Music
Lynne took songwriting at Berklee College of Music in Boston, but earning a music degree wasn't her thing. "I didn't really want to learn jazz. I didn't want to learn how to physically write trumpet parts. I didn't want to sit in a practice room all day creating four-part harmony for a horn section."

Local Love
Her roommate is a member of local band The Influence. When we met her, Lynne was wearing one of their tops. She loves Pawn Shop Lifters, too. Her first gigs were with the Norfolk Band. " Those guys are like the uncles and cousins that come to the reunion," she said. "They're my favorite."

Crowd Control
Lynne admits to being obnoxious. During a March show at Aromas in Newport News, she claimed to "drink milk straight from the utter. I don't know why I said that because I don't, but it was funny at the time," she said. "The shows aren't fun to me if I don't have people interacting and laughing along, and so if I have to talk about cow utters to that then oh well."

No Shoes
Socks feel much better. She sold her favorite pair during a show in Greenville, N.C. Lynne bought them at a New York KMart after steppiing in a puddle. Lynne will play her first New York City show on May 18th at the Annex. Perhaps, she'll pick up some new socks on her trip. - Link Magazine