Jourdann: Citizen of Taffy Town
Sometimes, everything is too real. We’re all guilty of being grown-ups and living in the real world a little too much, and songwriting is no different. But what if an artist decided to set their real songs in an imaginary world? Jourdann does just this with her new EP ‘Taffy Town’.
Image Credit: Charmaine Campbell.
Jourdann was born and raised in The Bronx, New York and has been maintaining a YouTube channel with uploads going back to 2014. As well as a steady stream of vlogs, Jourdann has recorded bedroom covers of many artists from Taylor Swift and Lorde to dodie and Billie Marten. Though her channel always featured a sprinkling of original songs too, it wasn’t until the pandemic where she would release her first EP entitled ‘Brain Machine Broke’ in September 2020. Her creativity extends beyond music as well, with Jourdann running her own merchandise and Etsy stores featuring hats, t-shirts, hoodies and stickers.
Following the release of her EP, Jourdann kept her creativity up by releasing ‘Ennui’ as a standalone single and participating in Orla Gartland’s ‘Pretending Re:imagined’ contest. Here Jourdann remixed Gartland’s track, placing it in the world of a high school prom in the 1980’s with an accompanying video, hinting at the escapism that was to come with her next work. The first single from Jourdann’s second EP ‘Taffy Town’ was released in April, with the full EP arriving in July.
‘I’ve been waiting for quite some time, for someone to call honey, someone to be mine. But it’s pointless, I know they’ll never come, ‘cause I’m stuck in this hole of coming undone…’
With ‘I Can’t Stop Thinking Of You’ beginning with just piano and a vocal, Jourdann rises gently into the world of Taffy Town. A story of unrequited love, though I can’t help feeling hopeful when Jourdann sings ‘And I know, there’s still work to do’, as if the protagonist is aware life is a work in progress.
Jourdann’s production work on this song is exactly right, serving the music without choking the sound. If you listen carefully, there are atmospheric layers which appear before the acoustic guitar and in between the peaks and troughs of the arrangement. Jourdann builds up a beat with bass drum and handclaps, with her mix spread across the stereo field to showcase all these parts, giving everything its own space. I feel the string arrangement was underused, and could’ve given a soaring ending to I Can’t Stop Thinking Of You. However, if I was able to predict that happening, it wouldn’t have been nearly as interesting as Jourdann’s own production decision.
The first single from Taffy Town comes in the form of ‘Simmering In Sadness’, where the pace picks up, the rhythm instruments having more of a place than the EP’s opener. Lyrically, this song is so honest. I feel this song couldn’t have been written by someone pretending to exude these emotions, which is why I’m so drawn to them. The first two verses in particular resonate:
‘I tried to fix my sleep schedule but woke at 1pm, my doctor says my problem is I spend all day in bed. They're slamming down my door each night, aliens from outer space. They question me to death about why I feel so out of place.’
What’s massively exciting about this EP is the possibility of what Jourdann might achieve with more resources at her disposal. Amongst electric guitar and keyboard lines, you’ll find a trumpet solo performed on a keyboard, which fits right in with the rest of the song. It’s amazing what can be achieved in a home studio, but what if Jourdann had an engineer, professional studio and a band to record her songs? I draw a similar comparison with Orla Gartland, whose great home productions have turned into full studio works with astonishing results.
The title track and second single begins with a cassette being loaded and a vibrant field recording of birdsong. In this strange time of cassette tapes being more popular amongst indie artists than CDs, I can totally see this EP selling out a run of its own. ‘Taffy Town’ is a love story where I’m equally enamoured by Jourdann’s pacing of her lyric, using a rhythm that can be heard but not read, and when read is utterly adorable and genuine:
‘I want to wrap you in an infinite hug, to tell the whole wide world about our love, that I like someone like you, and it's true, even if it's forbidden to do.’
It’s this rhythmic telling that is made all the more dynamic by Jourdann’s drum programming, using a ride cymbal to accent her guitar strumming and bass playing. The whole arrangement slots together perfectly and is later augmented by the sound of gossiping voices. Jourdann reached out on social media, with Maiga Vidal, Phaedra Mladen, Max, Trinity Lowthian, Deandra, Raf and Mar responding and featuring on the track. Jourdann’s editing works brilliantly to create the atmosphere by not focusing on any one voice too heavily, as if you’re really in the room with these anxiety-sparking discussions.
Jourdann takes Taffy Town into indie-electro territory with ‘Sick Of It’. In her continuing use of instruments beyond a typical band scope, Jourdann employs the use of a vibraphone throughout this track. This is what I mean when I talk about Jourdann’s future possibility as an artist and producer - how many other musicians turn to a vibraphone in a piece like this one?
Aside from this, I love Jourdann’s use of backing vocals in the chorus and the way her editing keeps them in a muted state. In her lyrics, Jourdann continues to capture the feeling of love unreciprocated, using words like ‘pining’ and ‘yearning’, even going as far as saying ‘I don’t wanna feel this way’, all summed up by the song’s title.
‘Lovelorn Ghost’ continues this thread, both musically and thematically. Again, Jourdann demonstrates the power of arrangement and production, showing how the drums, picked electric guitar, pad keyboards and synthesizer fit around her vocal well. Adding strummed guitar (or perhaps it’s ukulele?), Lovelorn Ghost’s outro is my favourite part of the song, which I wish went on longer. Contained to one verse, my mind envisages the ending of The Beach Boys’ ‘God Only Knows’:
‘I love you. Do you want me too? I want you, I won't forget about you.’
The closing piece on Taffy Town is ‘Don’t Want Your Kind’, easily the most gentle track on this collection. Jourdann maintains her sweet delivery over acoustic guitar and naturally programmed drums, moving away from the indie-electro style of the previous two tracks. She also returns to adding strings, which float well with Jourdann’s backing vocals. In addition, this song has the most keyboard parts, with piano and softer pads that give a different flavour to the more sombre string line.
‘Secrets kept in a drawer, and I'm not too sure you want to explore. Said you'd never stray, we'd never be apart, but this could break, the bond we hold close to our hearts.’
Lyrically, Don’t Want Your Kind is the most heart-wrenching of them all, a person torn between leaving someone they love because they feel their partner can’t handle them in their entirety. Throughout the track, the decision is agonised over, with the central character calling their loved one to tell them how they feel. The outcome of the situation is left unresolved, maybe even thoughtfully left up to the reader to decide in the EP’s pleading final words:
‘This is not something I want to wreck, I don't want you to leave me next. This is not something I want to wreck, please can you stay with me instead.’
We hope you enjoyed your stay in Taffy Town. Continue reading for our Q&A with Jourdann, where we dig deeper into the foundations of the EP, from the writing and recording of the music, to the artwork and the potential for Jourdann to perform her music live. All this and more below!
Image Credit: Charmaine Campbell.
1. The music of your latest EP centres on the fictional location of 'Taffy Town', but is any of the songwriting based on an element of truth?
A majority of the songs on this EP are actually based on some real life experiences I've gone through, but they were all written at different periods of time, so I thought that through this fictional world of ‘Taffy Town,’ I could string the stories together into something more cohesive. There are a couple of songs based in fiction as I have yet to experience those kinds of emotions, so I drew from the TV shows I enjoyed watching at the time. I often pull from TV shows when I’m writing, because I enjoy the stories that writers create. There are sometimes specific characters that I really resonate with and they’re put in scenarios that I have yet to find myself in, so I write about them and how I think they’re truly feeling during those moments. And actually, for a while on my YouTube channel I was writing a lot of songs based off of relationships from shows I really enjoyed, because they told different sides of experiences with love that I’ve yet to experience. So in short, there’s a mix of fiction and non-fiction on this EP and it’s up for the listeners to determine which is which or which resonates with them the most.
2. For the uninitiated outside of North America, what exactly is taffy? When did you decide to use it as a concept for this EP?
Taffy is a chewy, sticky candy that usually comes in different kinds of fruit flavors. If you put them in the fridge, they can get pretty hard so that as you chew it, it slowly melts and gets softer in your mouth. And if you look at my teaser for the EP, you can see what taffy looks like as it’s the main centerpiece in the teaser. The process of taffy slowly getting softer in your mouth and getting harder to swallow because it’s taking a long time to chew is a nice metaphor for the imaginary town the EP is centered around. And I actually came up with the idea for the metaphor last minute while doing lyric revisions for the title track. I felt that it was fitting, because it describes a town that’s slow to change which makes it hard to swallow. And I felt that it was fitting to describe the EP as a whole, because the themes that appear in this EP are also hard to swallow, but once you’re done you get a nice sweet taste at the end.
3. The recording of the EP was all done at home, what equipment did you use to record everything?
To record any and all audio including my voice or acoustic guitar, I used my Audio Technica AT-2035 Cardioid Condenser Microphone with a pop filter. I plugged in my acoustic guitar into my Focusrite Scarlett Solo Audio Interface and used plugins for the more electric guitar parts in songs. And I edited, mixed, and mastered everything on Logic Pro on my iMac that I got as a graduation present last year. I also have an AKAI MPK Mini Midi Controller to program some of the drums and some of the piano parts, but when I was sometimes too lazy to pull it out I just used the keyboard on my iMac to program those parts.
4. The title track of the EP features several other voices too, when did you get the idea to ask other people to contribute? Was it difficult layering audio of perhaps varying quality?
Originally the other voices weren’t planned. I just knew that I wanted a small instrumental section in the song. But once I was doing lyric revisions and added in the lyric “But we’re still here stuck to the roof of this town made of taffy,” I realized that the song would be set in Taffy Town, and so would all the songs that live on this EP. I was inspired to add the other voices-- the town gossipers-- to the song, because it’s a small town and small towns usually have those. Also I was listening to “Cowboy Like Me” by Taylor Swift a lot. She has this lyric that goes “And the ladies lunching have their stories about when you passed through town” which always resonated with me as the stereotype of the female small town gossipers. So I asked if anyone on Twitter would be willing to help me out by sending a clip of them speaking for a song and a few people responded. I gave them the prompt and background on the song and told them to improvise for up to a minute or more if they wanted and then added it all in. It was a really fun experience. It was a little difficult to layer all of their voices, because not everyone had a mic set up so all of the audio had different qualities to them. I didn’t want anyone to stand out too much and ruin the illusion of the song. Also, spacing everyone’s voices out so that it fit within the tempo of the music and everyone could be heard a little was pretty hard, but I’m so happy with how it turned out in the end. I’m super grateful for everyone who participated, and if you look at my bandcamp, you can find all the lovely people who contributed on the track there.
5. The vibrant artwork for 'Taffy Town' and the singles really suits the music, who put those together?
I actually put all the artwork together. For my previous EP, I had a friend, Vee (@ratatouvee on Instagram) put the art together, and they really did an amazing job. But this time around, I wanted to get more involved in the art making process. I thought it could be an amazing way to really make this EP more of my own; I had been practicing digital drawing over the course of the pandemic, so I thought it could be a cool way to contribute more to the project and practice my skills. I took a lot of time trying to figure out what I wanted each cover to mean to me, so there’s a lot of symbolism and hidden meaning behind the art that resembles the themes in each single. For example, the butterfly in the “Simmering in Sadness” single is trapped in a glass jar, it wants to leave and can be clearly seen for what it is but it’s stuck which I think really resonates with the themes of self-discovery and secrecy in plain sight in the single. And the frog in the “Taffy Town” single cover art is too big for the box it’s in and ready to move on and grow which really resonates with the running away from a place that no longer suits you or really wants you themes in the single. There’s a ton of symbolism in the cover art for the EP as well, but I’ll leave that for you to try and figure out as I love to see other people’s interpretations of the art.
6. If you could make a music video for any of the songs on the EP, which would you choose and what would it look like?
This is such a hard question, because I love all of these songs so much and in an ideal world, I would make a music video for all of them. But if I had to choose just a couple, I think one of them would be “Sick of It”. It’s one of my favorites to listen to and honestly probably my favorite on the album. And I would really love for it to feature a long car drive out to a cliffside, because when producing this song I really wanted it to sound like something you’d listen to on a long drive. Maybe also a scene of me sitting in an empty parking lot in the middle of the night or maybe I’d almost run into my crush at a bar downtown and have to rush out as quickly as possible into a taxi outside. I would also really love to do a music video for “Simmering in Sadness” that’s really bright and happy and features me doing stuff in front of a green screen. I just think the song deserves a really fun music video. I’d also really love to have a band in the music video since I feel it’d be fitting for the song. I’d love for outer space to be the setting for the song as well.
7. Recently you mentioned that you want to get out playing your songs live, are there some venues local to you that you'd like to play?
Oh that’s such a good question. I think specifically from where I’m from, there aren’t really any local venues to play at unless I would go to a high school or college and play in their theatre. But if I were to travel downtown to Manhattan or Brooklyn, I think I’d really love to play at Rockwood Music Hall, the Bowery Ballroom, the Mercury Lounge, Pete’s Candy Store or the Knitting Factory. Honestly, I’ll take any place that’ll have me.
8. Some of your earliest material on your Bandcamp page features covers from Billie Marten to Lorde and boygenius. If you were to do some covers in the summer of 2021, which songs would you cover?
I’m actually in the process of trying to revive my YouTube channel where I did a whole bunch of covers over the past few years. I would really love to cover anything off of Home Video by Lucy Dacus, because that album is amazing. Lost Cause by Aly and AJ, someone tell me who i am by Grace Manning, Dead Girl Walking by Jensen McRae, Ur Gonna Wish U Believed Me by Cavetown, Green Eyes by Arlo Parks, Special Girl by dodie, and Soft Spot by Claud are probably some other songs I’d love to cover.
9. If you could collaborate with any other artist, who would you love to work with?
There are so many artists that I would gladly collaborate just so that I could pick their brains. Taylor Swift comes to mind, because she’s just been my lifelong inspiration in terms of songwriting since I was 11 years old. I’d also love to collaborate with the following artists:
-Lucy Dacus because her songwriting is also amazing, and also her smooth voice is like butter and I mean I would love that on a track.
-Hayley Williams because her voice I mean wow, and also she just seems like such a fun person to work with.
-Orla Gartland and MUNA because I feel like producing with them would be a blast, and I’d learn so much about producing from them and we’d make fun tracks.
-Lorde because she’s such a legend, and also I really want to just talk about life with her. She just seems like a really interesting person to talk to.
-HAIM because their vibe is so cool, and also I love the production on their tracks. I’d really love to bring something interesting like what they have to the table.
-Chloe x Halle because even though their sound is super different from mine I always love whatever they make and their harmonies are to die for.
-Samia just because I love her voice. It’s so unique and floaty and dreamy, and I also really love how her songs sound so small but also epic at the same time.
10. What are your plans for the rest of 2021? Have you continued recording this summer?
By the end of the year I’d really love to release at least two more singles separate from Taffy Town. And I also plan on reviving my YouTube channel as I mentioned previously. I’d like to record some covers along with making some vlogs on there. I haven’t been recording as much leading up to this release as I’ve been handling doing all the promo along with going to work most of the time, but I’m excited to get back to recording sooner rather than later. I also really want to meet some more people in my local arts community in the meantime now that I’ve been vaccinated. And I’d also love to perform some shows whether that be online or in person.
--------
Purchase ‘Taffy Town’ and the previous works of Jourdann on her Bandcamp page.
To buy t-shirts, hats and hoodies, visit Jourdann’s merchandise store here.
Visit Jourdann’s store on Etsy to cover all of your things in stickers.
Subscribe to Jourdann’s community on Patreon for a behind-the-scenes look at her career.
Follow Jourdann on Instagram and Twitter @jourdannf.
--------
Follow and interact with Moths and Giraffes on Instagram and Facebook @mothsandgiraffes, and on Twitter @mothsgiraffes.
We have a Spotify Playlist! Featuring almost every artist we've written about on Moths and Giraffes, find some new music here.
For submissions, or if you’d just like to send us your thoughts, don’t hesitate to contact us via our social media accounts, our contact page, or via email at mothsandgiraffes@outlook.com. We receive a lot of emails though, so please bear with us!
