How Jessy Lanza Managed to Transform Her Anger Into Effervescent Pop on All the Time
Entertainment
Image: Milos Jacimovic/Courtesy Motormouthmedia
Before we talk about Jessy Lanza, we should talk about what we talk about when we talk about Jessy Lanza. The name describes at least three discrete, albeit connected, entities. There is Jessy Lanza the human, who was born in the mid-’80s and spent much of her life in Canada’s Hamilton, Ontario. Then there is Jessy Lanza the project. Lanza releases music under her own name, but what’s on her three albums is all the product of such an enmeshed collaboration between her and producer Jeremy Greenspan (known as one half of Junior Boys) that she says she can barely tell who did what sonically when the music is done and set to press.
“Jessy Lanza is my project, but it’s tricky because Jeremy Greenspan is such a huge part of it, too,” she said in a FaceTime chat in June from her partner’s parents’ place in California, where she was quarantining. “If we could go back, we’d probably call it something different. But it’s too late now.”
Finally (at least for our purposes—God knows we all contain multitudes), there is Jessy Lanza the persona, the sort of negotiation between the human and the project. The chirpy soprano Lanza presents to the world can come across as spunky, willful, and coquettish on her albums (her Galleria project with electronic producer Morgan Geist is a study in ’80s dance-pop giddiness that’s controlled and precise enough to function as a dissertation). Her lyrics are often vague splashes of emotions, and while her tracks’ BPMs run the gamut from frenetic footwork to pulsating disco to straight-up slow jams, you’d generally have to strain your ear to make out even a tinge of pathos.
And so, it may come as a surprise, even after listening to it several times (as I had by the time we talked) that her excellent third album, All the Time, is the product of tumult. Lanza told me that she experienced “growing pains” after moving to New York in the wake of her 2016 sophomore release Oh No. Greenspan’s hanging back in Hamilton cast doubt on the future of their collaboration. And then there were the anger management issues.“I just found that I was walking around and I felt angry all the time—and it’s exhausting to feel that way,” she said. “The whole album was really me just working through being a bit of an asshole to people. Not everybody, but partners, my family. All the people who are close.”
All the Time is, in many ways, Lanza’s poppiest release, albeit prone to unconventional song structures and “weird blips and burpy, squirty sounds,” as Lanza calls them. Much of those gurgled out of new modular/semi-modular gear that Lanza experimented with, and so intricate (yet delicate) is the sound design that some of the songs’ painstaking assembly is reminiscent of that of the groovily minimal “microhouse” movement of the early aughts. All the Time is frequently bizarre and sometimes slapstick, with Lanza’s candy-coated voice floating atop her gurgling avant-pop creations. Though for all of its meticulous bumps and delirious interjections, it doesn’t really sound angry. Ever.
“I was feeling pretty shitty when I was writing a lot of the record. I think when I’m feeling bad, I try to go hard in the opposite direction,” explained Lanza. “Maybe that’s where the sound is coming from: I gotta get myself out of this dank little hole that I’m in. I gotta just do something that’s the opposite of how bad I’m feeling.”
All the Time, then, is an exercise in musical interference, how art can transubstantiate pain into joy right before your ears. Two of the most straightforward bangers, the first single “Lick in Heaven” and the penultimate party-in-a-track “Over and Over” are both musings on conflicts. The goofy accompanying video for “Lick in Heaven” finds Lanza playing to a talk-show audience full of enthusiastic dancers of varying rhythmic aptitude. It’s meant to satirize societal expectations on women. “It’s a constant pressure,” said Lanza. “I’m always dealing with this thought that, like, I’m not a rotten piece of fruit. I’m not a piece of fruit that’s going bad.”
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