Jordana is Right Where She Belongs

Jordana Nye is a self-proclaimed “chameleon”—a singer-songwriter who really has never settled into one place or one niche. Raised in Maryland, the 24-year-old has made records in New York apartments, sung through more genres than you can count on one hand and has been nurturing the Great American Songbook of the 21st century through robust inquisitiveness. There are pros and cons to that, to getting yourself entangled in the challenges of uncategorical restlessness; the biggest problem is, according to Jordana, a matter of comparison and perception. “I would love to have my own identifiable sound, but there’s too many different types of things to be made and too many things that I’m obsessed with—too many genres I want to try,” she says. “I feel like, [with] every record I sing differently, I can’t fully grasp who I am as an artist, really. I get a little self-conscious about my voice, because I’m like, ‘Is anyone even going to know this is me?’ ‘Am I being dramatic and I do sound the same?’ I can’t really grasp how I’m perceived, so I’m just gonna Milly Rock it.”

The upside to making five records in four years that all have their very own oneness , however, is that Jordana is able to offer different styles of music to everyone she encounters—be it the dream pop of “Jackie’s 15,” the electronica of “Guaranteed,” the lo-fi, soul-inflected indie rock of “Better in the Dark” or the poppy, alt-cresting tome of “Go Slow.” “If they’re not into one thing that I do, then they could be into another record that I do,” she says. “It feels fresh each time. You don’t really get bored with it very easily, if you like playing around with different kinds of music.” Lively Premonition, Jordana’s brand new album and fifth since 2020, is full of summery optimism, hummable harmonies, yacht rock, Laurel Canyon greenery and vestiges of a rock-tinged contemporary.

Jordana isn’t a thread-follower. Sure, there’s probably a comparable element between Lively Premonition and her 2022 EP I’m Doing Well, Thanks for Asking, but she works from scratch more than from well-established ideas. “There’s no bias for it, it’s just new every time,” she says. “With new people that I start projects with, we build that connection in what we make—especially with Emmett [Kai]. He’s fucking amazing, and we can goof out together to a fault.” She met Kai after finding his music on David Dean Burkhart’s channel and messaging him in 2021. “I was like, ‘Hey, I live in New York! Where are you? Let’s make music at some point,’ and then we never did for, like, a year and a half,” Jordana continues. “Then I went to LA, I was working on some music there for something else, but he happened to be in LA at the same time.” Together, they went to a friend’s studio, sparked a chemistry and, eventually, would link up in Kingston, New York to “cook something up” across four days of sessions. Then, after making two songs with Kai on the East Coast, Jordana moved to Los Angeles permanently and flew back and forth for six months to finish Lively Premonition.

“It’s been a pattern of mine, to make a trip out of recording an album,” she says. “[Classical Notions of Happiness], my first record, it was bedroom stuff but I was flying back and forth for the second one, [Something to Say to You], from Wichita to New York. Then, I moved to New York. For the next one, [Summer’s Over], I flew to LA to make it. Now I’m in LA and I flew to New York to make [Lively Premonition]. It’s always to cross the country, but it’s crazy how, last minute, I was like, ‘I’m going to go up [to Kingston], just to see what we can make. And then, all of a sudden, this record’s coming out.”

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.