Jenee Halstead

“I felt the fear fade away” With THE RIVER GRACE Jenee Halsteed (34) gave us one of the most beautiful Americana records of the past year. Recently the not-so-famous American traveled through Holland. From Delfzijl to Bergen op Zoom and from Heerlen to Spijkerboor she performed in all kinds of bars and venues. “It’s hard to perform for people who don’t especially come to see you.” by Eric van Domburg Scipio Small and delicate, with a fun and fresh look - cute but not sugary. That is Jenee Halstead. She grew up in Spokane, Washington, in the Northwest of the United States, where her love for music was a big part of her upbringing. “My father was a huge fan. At home music was always on. From James Brown, Bob Dylan, Moby Grape to obscure acid rock and garage rock from the sixties.” The soundtrack of O Brother, Where Art Thou? with Gillian Welch, Alison Krauss and Emmylou Harris awakened her interest for country and especially bluegrass. Patty Griffin, however, was the one who inspired her to make music herself. “The story goes that everyone who heard the first album of the Velvet Underground started their own band.” Something similar happened to her after hearing Living With Ghosts by Patty Griffin. “That album led to a new wave of female singer-songwriters. One of them was me.” “It’s better to just rely on myself” Discovery In the late nineties Jenee Halstead settled in Seattle where she did not succeed in building a career as a singer-songwriter. “There where several places to perform and the audience was not unfriendly towards me. But I mainly performed country classics and a few Alison Krauss songs because I was simply too shy to sing my own songs.” Heavily influenced by Joni Mitchell and Nick Drake, Jenee saw herself primarily as a folk artist. This was one of the reasons her decision to move to the East Coast seemed like a good one, because for decades Boston has been considered the American epicenter of folk. In Cambridge, manager Matt Smith from the legendary Club Passim (previously known as Club 47) was impressed by Halstead. He quickly informed Evan Brubaker, a producer from Seattle, who instantly offered his services to Halstead. “He didn’t know who I was, but I knew him. An accomplished and creative person, so I had no second thoughts about working with him.” Accompanied by an acoustic guitar, dobro, mandolin, bass, keyboards, and an electronic percussion Halstead took eleven days to record The River Grace. “Over the years I had written many songs. Half in the vein of Nick Drake, the other half more country and bluegrass. Together with Evans’ wife, singer-songwriter Megan Peters, I critically studied the whole bunch. That resulted in a nice selection of which I am very proud.” The River Grace tends towards folk and bluegrass. The recently released mini-album Hollow Bones has a noticeable roots sound with clear country influences. The small but powerfully-voiced Halstead keeps her music, in the words of the Club Passim Manager, “fresh and new, yet familiar and timeless”. Agony For the debut of a relatively young singer-songwriter The River Grace surprisingly contains many songs in which death plays a role. Even more remarkable is that the death on the album doesn’t have a morbid purpose, but is presented in the light of salvation. Jenee Halstead crawls into the shoes of fictional characters that face the hurt and anger of troubled outcasts. Consequently, they are more likely to die young, which gives Halstead the opportunity to deal with her own fear of death. “It’s not that I want all my main characters to die, but sometimes you have no choice of how some things end.” Achievement Not many people have come to the double bill of Jenee Halstead and Joe Iadanza in Cafe de Rode Pimpernel in Den Bosch. Moreover, both singer-songwriters have to deal with the regular customers in the bar, where smoking is not yet banned. However, partially due to her charming presentation Halstead wins the audience over, though is seems to go wrong towards the end when someone requests a song, and she is then overwhelmed with requests she doesn’t know - ‘play something by Ben Harper’. But, after she improvises Jolene, a Dolly Parton classic, the night cannot go wrong. How good her performance is doesn’t become clear until the set of Iadanza (who brings Cat Stevens to mind). With a few catchy songs the New Yorker almost gets the whole bar to sing at the start of his performance, but along the way the ordinary songs can’t hold the audiences attention, causing his performance to diminish. A week later in Culturhuis Patronaat in Heerlen, Iadanza gets the sad news that his grandfather has passed and he suddenly has to go back home. “It was very sad even though, in a way, it turned out to be good for me,” Halstead says. “Until then, he took care of almost everything – from the transportation to the contact with the bars. Now I have to take care of everything on my own”. Conviction Joe Iadanza is not yet on the plane to New York when the European air space is closed because of Icelandic ash clouds, making it impossible for other artists to reach the Netherlands. For Halstead only Café Briljant in Haarlem and Vestzaktheater the Zwijnshoofd in Bergen op Zoom are left on her tour schedule, but now singer-songwriters can’t make it to the Netherlands, and she is asked to perform in The Stables in Boskoop and at Taverne De Waag in Haarlem. The latter situation is quite delicate because, when planning her tour, De Waag wasn’t interested in Halstead at all. However, after her convincing performance the manager personally admitted his mistake and emphasized that the doors will always be wide open for Halstead. A few days later at a mini-festival in Bergen op Zoom, hosted by Crossroads Radio, English folkie Emma Black and American Steve Noonan – an old friend of Jackson Browne – cannot stand in her shadow. The highlight of the set is Nick Drake, her beautifully and intensely sung tribute to the British melancholic who died almost forty years ago. Without naming him or even giving a musical hint, she captures his essence in heart-rending lines such as How do you dance all night? When your heart won’t feel the rhythm, your feet won’t take to flight. How do you put meaning into something that is not there? I am so lonely now, so lonely now, I just don’t care.