Jordana is Right Where She Belongs

Lively Premonition is not her “LA record,” despite its Laurel Canyon tones attitude, her current zip code and the one time she did say it was. “I do think that the sun has made a big difference for me,” Jordana says. “It’s made me feel like I’ve found an inner glowy part of myself, which feels good—it’s better than being locked away in a dark New York apartment and being sad. That’s not very inspiring. But, here, I’ve made long, lasting connections and friends. For the first time in my life, I have a group of best friends that I actually hang out with and we have a group chat. I always felt like I didn’t belong—I just wasn’t really included. But, now, I’m pretty confident in a lot of different aspects of my life, and I think that reflects in what I’m making.”

Jordana has been no stranger to collaboration over the years, appearing on Dent May’s new song “Coasting on Fumes,” working with TV Girl, Yot Club and Paul Cherry, and making EPs with her friends in their apartments since she was a teenager. Community, for her, is irreplaceable in her art. “It’s critical to be able to kick it with them and just be excited about finishing something, too, and having something and being proud of it and wanting to put it out there,” she declares. “There’s no way I could have made a record with someone that I can’t be friends with. There are recording days and I’m just like, ‘I can’t do anything today, let’s just hang out.’” In her time spent with May and Cherry and all else who’ve crossed paths with her, Jordana has learned to adapt to other artists’ ways of creating, understanding their styles and trying to blend in with what their processes are.

On “Raver Girl,” Jordana was trying to evoke Daryl Hall’s voice, because she loved the confidence and straightforwardness of it—calling it “time and place for belting.” For the “lower” songs, like “Heart You Hold” and “Your Story’s End,” she and Kai were referencing the Carpenters and, in the studio the two were siphoning bits and pieces from the Mamas and the Papas. “When we started, I was going through a break-up and he showed me ‘Step Out’ by the Mamas and the Papas,” she says. “It’s one of my favorite songs of all time now. We shared influences and would listen to shit and be like, ‘Dude, we should make something like this,’ and tried our hand at it.” Hearing that shouldn’t be surprising, as a song like “We Get By” conjures flickers of the Mamas and the Papas performing “Monday, Monday” on The Ed Sullivan Show years and years ago—the big harmonies, belty, room-clearing main vocal and, of course, that always-lingering confidence. “You gotta have faith that what you’re doing is really cool,” Jordana affirms. “You gotta love what you’re doing, to make anything good and genuine.”

“Like a Dog” is quintessentially yacht rock, though I couldn’t even begin to tell you why. It’s a genre built on vibes and rock music featuring horns, and Lively Premonition is a good modern candidate for the next entry into the seaside canon. “I do a mean Michael McDonald impression,” Jordana says, confirming that “What a Fool Believes” is her karaoke song. “It’s hard, though, because I’m a woman—how yacht-rocky can I go without trying to sound like a dude?” With all of the time signature switches and piano elements across Lively Premonition, she’ll fasten nicely in-between Suzie Quatro and Nicolette Larson soon enough—and the walls of masculine yacht rock will topple over brick-by-brick.

Lively Premonition tells a familiar story: somebody moves to a new city and reflects on their relationships, both past and present (“I poured my heart out, because it was such an intense time,” Jordana says. “Emmett was a trooper through all of that, because I was just so anxious all the time. I would just be super dramatic about it”). It’s substance versus significance—a new blend of fact and fiction, as “Anything For You” interrogates the dynamic between settling and moving on while “Like a Dog” is her imagined idea of what it might feel like to be truly desperate for somebody else. For the first time since 2020, Jordana is able to step out of herself and into someone she’s never been—singing from a heart that’s not always her own.

“I’ve dug even deeper into my creative process in a way that allows me to separate that, which I never thought I was able to do, because I have written, primarily, from present emotions, present situations going on in my life,” she says. “That was the writing on the wall that became legible, that I am capable of that—I am capable of not feeling anything and still making something that sounds like I am. It’s a heavy load to have, to feel like you have to write all about what you’re feeling at a time when it’s so intense—because you just exhaust yourself. Then, after you’ve written about it, you’re like, ‘Okay, I feel better but now I’m rung dry. I don’t know what else I’m supposed to write about if it’s not this.’

Striking that sort of balance can challenge you as a writer, and Jordana has long fostered a propensity for weaving the details of her life into vague recollections—merging the serious with the silly without sacrificing herself. “I don’t really want to give away a lot of the personal details, so I just write around something that could evoke that,” she says. “I want to write a little more generically without just being a cookie-cutter.” Then comes the give-and-go, of not wanting to ruin a situation through improvising the way it turns out for you and your characters. “It’s a lot easier to write directly from how you’re feeling, and it does feel good, because you just word-vomit it out,” Jordana continues. “It’s like writing in a journal, which I don’t really do. If I am going to write about things going on in my mind, I’m like, ‘I want to turn this into something so that I’m not just sitting here.’ Where does it go after that? If you’re writing in a journal, are you just gonna read it by yourself later and just get sad again? No, I want to feel it with everyone else. If I have to feel like shit, then you have to feel like shit… No, I’m kidding.”

The song “We Get By” features a violin solo, courtesy of Jordana herself. Despite her self-imposed “chameleonic” label, that part of the song is the most quintessentially authentic and long-standing she’s ever been on a record—as she spent the formative years of her life focusing on “being the best I can be at violin.” “I was always that ‘violin girl,’ and I thought that was what I was going to do for my career. I thought that I wanted to be in orchestras and go to college for it, or something,” Jordana says. “But then, very quickly, I found indie rock and how cool people are. I shied away from the violin for a long time, because I felt pretty spiteful of it. It sounds silly to me now, because I’m like, ‘Why did I not bring this to the limelight if I spent so much of my time on it?’ I definitely put it on my other records, but I never really gave it a spotlight until this one—which I want to keep doing, because I’m like, ‘Why did I hide this away for so long? It was my whole life!’ I know it better than any instrument and I just don’t use it. I’m in my mirror like, ‘Make that make sense, bitch.’

After going through trials of different improvisation, Jordana made it make sense, finally letting go of othe orchestra-driven rigidity so deeply ingrained in her creativity and refusing to let the instrument become pigeonholed as a classical tool any longer. “There’s a lot of pressure that comes with that—and from someone who has been reading sheet music her whole life,” she says. “I just want to stick to whatever it says on the sheet and have my own little twist on it but not stray too far from it. I immensely respect jazz musicians, because I’m like, ‘How the fuck do you do that? This note is not in the same key but you make it sound so good! How do you do that?’ There was a lot of pressure with even just writing a solo. You’ve got to make it good, that’s what’s scary. I was thinking to myself, ‘Is this too long?’ But then I was like, ‘No, if I’m going to do violin, I’m going all in and I’m going to make it cray-cray in the best way.’ I just want to make my orchestra teacher proud.”

Anchored beneath a well-lit sky, Lively Premonition is Jordana at her very best. Her exaggerated, anecdotal style collides with a melting pot of multi-generational, feel-good tuneage that beams with love, partying, self-discovery, lust and all that flutters in-between. The record begins in earnest, memorializing affection and considering how growth may become a guardian of peace—how you might begin holding onto yourself as tightly as you do others—only to end with three consecutive break-up songs. It’s a spectrum ripe with conflicting emotions and contradicting forces—a confluence of everything that makes Jordana tick, whether it’s the singer-songwriter assuredness of Carole King or the hyper-intoxicating bliss of 21st century bedroom nuggets. Here, she saunters, she pleads and she takes big swings. Breaking out of her indie-shaped box, Jordana’s new era is malleable and without miss.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.