Tag: Jane Kramer

LISTEN: Jane Kramer, “Hymn”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Jane Kramer
Hometown: Asheville, North Carolina
Song: “Hymn”
Album: Valley of the Bones
Release Date: March 1, 2019

In Their Words: “This song was a kind of ‘homework’ assignment from my songwriting mentor, Mary Gauthier. She looked me in the eye and told me that all of my self-deprecation wasn’t cute or charming and asked me, ‘When are you going to drop the bullsh*t and really own your power and talent?’ She told me that only then would I write the kind of songs that were up to my full potential. She challenged me to write a song from a perspective of self-love. Like, full, real, spiritual and true self-love, and to call it my ‘Hymn,’ whatever that meant to me. I spent a few weeks after that alone, backpacking around Italy with a little travel guitar. I wrote this song in a little mountain village called Vetulonia, where I slept in a little cottage with a hammock for a bed, looking out over mountains that reminded me of home, and it sunk in then that I couldn’t really come home till I came home to myself. So I did.” — Jane Kramer

Photo Credit: Rose Kaz

LISTEN: Jane Kramer, ‘Carnival of Hopes’

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Jane Kramer
Hometown: Asheville, NC
Song: "Carnival of Hopes"
Album: Carnival of Hopes
Release Date: February 26

In Their Words: "I wrote 'Carnival of Hopes' when I was living on a little houseboat in the Columbia River in Portland, Oregon, and was missing the Blue Ridge Mountains and the life I lived there. The whole song stemmed from this one line that first popped into my head while I was taking the garbage out one evening:

'This morning there were two crows by the road / They were flying curiously close and swooping dangerously low / and I couldn't tell if they were lovers or if they were fighting foes …'

For me, it's a song about the moment you realize — truly and viscerally — that the love of your life did not last for your whole lifetime and that, although you know that you need to lay down your hammer and quit trying and give yourself over to that truth, your heart will always be looking up at the stars wondering if your person is seeing them in the burning way that you are, right at that moment. Even while you are in someone else's arms. It's a song about coming to grips with getting older and also with the fact that relationships — even the kind made of tattooed-on-your-bones-love — can be so bright and gaudy and beautiful and, most of all, fleeting; they're gone and taken down as quickly as they were built up, just like a carnival. — Jane Kramer

Photo credit: Sandlin Gaither