Nick Jaina

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.

I did a session at the beginning of the year on KDVS radio in Davis, California. I called in from a landline at my parents house in Folsom, California and played a few songs. The thin phone fidelity led an eerie quality to recordings, like I was phoning in from the 1930′s.

I played a couple old songs, a couple new songs, a cover and some other stuff. You can listen to the session here.

Here is last week’s column. I was staying in Los Angeles for the week and went to see some stand up comedy. I’ve been interested in learning more about comedy this year as it relates to music, because a solo musician is kind of like a stand-up comedian in their available resources.

If you like my columns, please RT them, as they say, on Twitter. I just realized that you can actually request that people do that and sometimes they actually will. I thought that you just had to patiently sit by and humbly expect people to do that if they felt so inclined.

OPB Music is debuting a new song from my upcoming album of different female singers. This particular song features Jolie Holland singing a song I wrote and produced called “You Were So Good To Me”. I played Scrabble with Jolie a few weeks ago and she knows ALL the two and three letter words, and she’s perfectly willing to play them all.

I went to Central Park last week with the Love Drunk video crew, who filmed me playing a new song amidst the cherry blossoms in the friscalating dusklight. The song is “Ortoloan” from my new record.

On the record this song is sung by the incredible Myshkin. I first met her in New Orleans. She has several diverse albums that are full of intricate lyrics and gorgeous melodies. I chose her for this song because it almost seemed like the kind of song she would write.