Jen Olive - Warm Robot

Jen Olive decided to heed some advice from a friend. Sure...why not send a few of her left-of-center, alt-folk/pop songs to someone who might appreciate them...say Andy Partridge, founder of acclaimed British uber-cult band XTC and new music aficionado? So she did. Intrigued, Partridge decided to do more than listen. Over many months and without actually meeting face to face, the two corresponded and collaborated: she sent him basic demos, he "enhanced" the production with his own instrumentation and mixes and, track by track, week by week, the astonishing Warm Robot was created. Music completed, the pair finally met in London last December. "He filled in the blank spaces," Olive says of Partridge. "It was all recorded in a very organic and natural way. Who would have thought I'd need to hook up with someone 7,000 miles across the world to make something that made sense?"

In typical idiosyncratic style, Partridge calls Olive "this astounding allegro algorithm from Albuquerque" which is just about the best way to try an describe the artist whose intricate, sophisticated songs can turn a pop melody inside out and upside down. The lines are unpredictable and oblique, often appearing to lack an anchoring center, shape-shifting from one line to another as vocal harmonies and elaborate guitar lines dart about. At times reminiscent of Jesca Hoop -- another American who needed to find open arms (and ears) across the big pond -- Olive (and Partridge) make songs such as the quirky, acoustic folk jumble "Wire Wire" and languid, jazz-tinged and sumptuous "All My Heads Meet" dazzling creations with equal measures of substance and style. Warm Robot arrives March 30 via Partridge's own Ape label. Highly recommended. Full bio and "Boulevard" video after the jump...

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Jen Olive - "All My Heads Meet" (from the album Warm Robot)

Jen Olive - "Wire Wire" (from the album Warm Robot)

(Strange video -- but a good way to hear Warm Robot's opening track)...

Suggestion: Head over to the APE label site for two Jen Olive podcasts where she plays and discusses songs from Warm Robot.

Born in California but "raised everywhere", Jen Olive's mother was a lounge jazz singer, her father a trombone player. "We probably moved about 35 times before I was 16", she explains. Having eventually settled in L.A., she then moved to Albuquerque a few years ago to meet her dad’s "crazy jazz" family (her uncle is the lead saxophone player for the Count Basie Orchestra).

Moving to Albuquerque had a profound effect on her. "It's a weird and foreign landscape compared to L.A. or New York", she says. "It's pretty Wild West, but at the same time it's the kind of place where you'd expect aliens to land. The joke is that we had a perfectly nice third world country till they started putting streetlights in. The depth and character of the place is in the old indigenous families, and you can‘t help but be influenced by the culture. It's very different, there'’s not a lot of conventional Americana here."

Warm Robot is Jen Olive’s first "official" album, despite some low-key, self-released recordings in the past under different names. She prefers what she calls "an attachment to anonymity", though she accepts she's now running with the name Jen Olive. If Warm Robot enjoys the success it deserves, she'll be calling herself Jen Olive for quite a long while.

Jen first hooked up with Andy Partridge back in 2007, sending him an exploratory e-mail after a friend suggested he might be open to ideas. She didn't know a lot about Andy, despite having bought Skylarking and Oranges & Lemons back in the day. For months she and Andy were in regular contact, until Andy suggested she should make a record for Ape.

"After hearing the initial songs", continues Jen, "Andy asked if he could arrange and mix them, as they were a little too raw and unfinished-sounding." Aside from "Boulevard" (which opens the album), all the songs were written and recorded in real time, from spring until winter of 2008. Jen wrote and recorded them at home, sent them to Andy and, while he was enhancing them, she’d write and record some more until they had enough for an album - a process she describes as "from shack to shed".

Jen and Andy discovered a perfect musical synchronicity purely by chance (though they didn't actually meet until last December, by which time the album was finished). When she sent each new song to Andy, Jen sketched out the album's intriguing percussion parts using rocks, wine bottles, her kid's blocks - anything she had to hand. Andy reimagined her basic percussive techniques and then added other effects (such as a choir at the end of "Set It On Fire"), as well as some spooky keyboards here and there. "He filled in the blank spaces. It was all recorded in a very organic and natural way. Who would have thought I'd need to hook up with someone 7,000 miles across the world to make something that made sense? It's ludicrous that I haven't been able to do this with anyone local but Andy has his penchants and I have mine. We found we had compatible levels of weirdness."

Asked about influences, Jen says the music that mattered to her early on was by the Beach Boys, Stevie Wonder and particularly Karen Carpenter, in terms of her singing, the tone of her voice and the importance of melody. Later in life, she discovered David Bowie and Kate Bush. "She's the only person I own everything by, almost one of those OCD things - I had to have it all." If a little Kate Bush rubbed off, it’s in Jen Olive's sense of originality, intricately melodic songs with twisted rhythms and time changes. And, like all the best songwriters, she's soaked up a little of everything she's heard and experienced through her musical family's jazz background, along with a little of that New Mexican flair and colour.

Jen Olive is a songwriter first - a singer-songwriter in the loose tradition of those classic, only recently rediscovered seventies artists such as Ruth Friedman and Judee Sill, except she's very much in the here and now. Like Kristin Hersh or Bjork, Jen Olive's vision is modern and unique. There's just no right way to describe Warm Robot - it's essentially acoustic-based, then subtly embellished. All you have to do is listen; the songs are delightful, distinguished and highly personal and, with a little help from Andy Partridge, she has just followed the music where it has taken her.