Uphill Both Ways by Jenn Lindsay

Her music is “a powerful call-to-arms for struggling urban artists everywhere” (Suite 101) and she’s “a talent to be reckoned with” (Splendid). Her music is featured on MTV and on compilation albums put out by the ACLU and SBS Records.

Jenn Lindsay’s sixth and seventh studio albums, Uphill Both Ways and Perfect Handful, were both financed entirely by her fans. Uphill Both Ways is a declaration of independence, a love letter, a primal scream, and a homecoming announcement (back to music and back to NYC). It’s a pageant of change, growing up, grief, and the little things that get us out of bed in the morning. Jenn Lindsay works indie all the way, recording out of a tiny apartment in Manhattan where the drum kit rests on a bedspread, the microphone pop filter is a sock stretched over a coat hanger, and percussion sounds include apples and a pen dragged over the wire of a spiral notebook. To keep costs down on her albums Uphill Both Ways and Perfect Handful, Jenn Lindsay learned to play as many instruments as she could: the guitar, piano, banjo, baritone ukulele, mandolin, drums, keyboard, xylophone and harmonica. The most difficult (no joke) was the tambourine.

Jenn’s last album, The Last New York Horn, was released by Waterbug Records in Chicago. She’s the most popular singer/songwriter you’ve never heard of, with rabid followings in Indianapolis, Amarillo TX, and Santa Cruz. “Something good has to come out of the current economic downturn, right? Well, here’s one: anti-folk singer-songwriter Jenn Lindsay.” (Village Voice)

A 2003 Boston Globe editor's pick, Jenn started gigging at age 19 while in the acting program at the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts, playing in British pubs where patrons ate fish sandwiches. She graduated to New York City, where initially, patrons stared into their beers, but after three years voted her the “best female singer-songwriter in NYC” (Radio Crystal Blue). Since Jenn started touring nationally, she has played her songs in exchange for free catfish in Alabama, sang to a room full of friendly cowgirls in Amarillo Texas, entertained in Vegas, and played encores to Ladyfest attendees in Memphis, Brooklyn, Santa Cruz and Ottawa. In addition to appearing at universities and coffee shops, Jenn has played LadyFests, BMI Showcases, the New York Songwriter’s Circle, political rallies at Rockefeller Center, and lots of screwball dives around the country.

In NYC, Jenn's musical community is the Antifolk scene, a hub of musicians based in the East Village's Sidewalk Cafe, who share a mutual distaste for mediocre, well-packaged mainstream music. Lindsay promotes her albums by opening for national acts Melissa Ferrick, Chris Barron (The Spin Doctors), Erin McKeown, Toshi Reagon, Girlyman, Bitch and Animal and Alix Olson at venues in the Northeast and in Canada. Her music, "delicate and tough...stark urban imagery" (San Diego Union-Tribune), showcases "a talent well-versed in the field of social protest music” (Stanford Daily).

Smother.com remarks, “Jenn Lindsay has her finger right on the pulse of the whole wide world of working people everywhere.” That’s probably due to the string of frustrating day jobs and subway-platform performances that supported her when she was not actively gigging. Even though Rambles Magazine believes that “If some of her songs were given the exposure that they deserve, New York would be one receptionist short but the folk world would be one star richer,” the impoverished struggle of being a solo artist in NYC sent Jenn out onto the road, booking her own shows, leading college workshops, and forming traveling collectives with other emerging artists.

There’s hope yet for Jenn to break through the throng. That’s because, according to Suite101.com, "She’s a DIY Renegade. Folks like Jenn Lindsay provide reason to listen to every indie disc that comes in the mail."

--Sue Maguire, Uphill Publicity, January 2006

uphill@bust.com

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