Nick Jaina

Matthew Singer at Willamette Week in Portland did a great job weaving together the story of all the songs on my new album. Check out the extended web interview here.

Hello. I’ll be officially releasing my new album in Portland Wednesday August 24th, and following that with a tour of Western and Mountain States for two weeks in September.

The Portland show will be at Mississippi Studios and will feature the vocals of Kaylee Cole, Laura Gibson, Tahoe Jackson and others. Also on the bill are three of my favorite bands: Dovekins from Denver, Spirits of the Red City from Minneapolis, and Run On Sentence from Portland. The tour will feature Kaylee Cole and me trading vocals with a four-piece band accompanying.

You can see all the dates on the right of this page.

My new album “The Beanstalks That Have Brought Us Here Are Gone” is officially out in the digital world today. You can listen and download over at Bandcamp, or at iTunes. A physical release (ew, gross) and proper tour will be coming in a couple months.

So many wonderful singers lent their talents to this project. Please have a listen, at least for their sake.

My recent column is about hipsters in Portland, and how the racial composition of a city matters in terms of the type of conversation the residents have about race. It’s a lot less dry than that description makes it sound, honest.

It’s also about the rapture that didn’t happen on May 21st. If it HAD happened, it would’ve looked something like this.

Wouldn’t THAT have been awesome!?

I’ve been working on a ballet and choral music project with some people in New York over the last year. I’m pleased to say that it’s now complete and I’ll be able to preview it with our little ensemble in Portland on June 30th.

Amanda Lawrence and Nathan Langston will be joining me onstage at the Alberta Rose Theatre. We’re calling ourselves the Satellite Ensemble and excited to present this music without the dance.

This will be the only foreseeable time that you can hear this music on the west coast. The full premiere of the ballet with dance will be in New York City in October.

My friend Brooke Weeber designed the cover for my new album The Beanstalks That Have Brought Us Here Are Gone. We talked over different ideas of creating artwork that had more depth than an illustration, and we came up with the idea of building a diorama. All I told her was that I wanted some bees in it somehow and she took it from there.

To the right is a different diorama she made, this one not quite as awesome or righteous as the bee-filled one she made for my album cover, but still pretty cool. Just kidding, everything she makes is a golden expression of God’s will.

She’s got a bunch of great illustrations, prints, cards and such at her site. You should get to know her.

A couple years ago I attended a dinner hosted by Michael Hebb. He likes to put artists and gastronomes in the same room with wonderful food and try to spark conversation. He told me that I should get up after the meal and play with the incredible singer Tahoe Jackson. It was a great idea, but the only issue was that I’d never played with her before and we had no material. I had recently played “At Last” at a wedding and suggested we should do that. She shook off that suggestion and said that I should just play “something in 6/8 time.”

Scott and William were there too and I just started in on something on the piano and she started singing and it turned into an amazing, unrepeatable spontaneous seven-minute song.

Seattle radio station KEXP was there with cameras and caught the whole thing on video. You can watch it here.

I played four songs with my band on KEXP radio in Seattle last November. The wonderful singer Kaylee Cole joined us on a song too. They recorded the whole thing on video. Here is an unreleased new song “Love Potion.”

You can find the rest of the videos on YouTube if you search for “Nick Jaina” and “KEXP”…

I spent a week in Los Angeles and got two parking tickets. The first was when I was taking a ten-minute nap in my car. The second was when I felt like I had earned a free fifteen minutes of parking and didn’t pay the meter. I walked up to my van to see a meter maid guy putting a ticket on my window. I was so angry that I crumpled it up and threw it on the ground. Los Angeles.

My new column this week is about my week there and some thoughts I’ve had about jealousy in music.

The title of the essay comes from the Liz Phair song “Jealousy”. Somehow even though she’s from Chicago she seems like exactly the best kind of music to listen to while in L.A.

I’ve done two recording sessions over at the Daytrotter studios in Rock Island, Illinois. The most recent one came out last April and features some live in-studio recordings of some of my songs, including an older unreleased song. Sean at Daytrotter always writes beautiful summaries of the bands on the site, and he wrote some really flattering words for me:

“He’s made a spectacular jaw-dropper in the just released ‘A Bird In The Opera House,’ an album that startles and makes you swoon to it and its easy beauty. Its songs are full of delicate loves and the troubles with them, floating on flimsy clouds and negligent stars/moons and sentences, working themselves into heady folk country as well as undeniably sleek and ruffled pop in the style that George, Paul, Ringo and John used to make way back when.”

Thanks, Sean. Listen to the session over at Daytrotter.