Full Moon in 3 by Jennifer Terran

It also marks Jennifer Terran out as one of the most creative and distinctive singer/songwriters around at the moment. An early contender for album of 2006? I will be surprised if anything released in 2006 will match this for its emotional intensity and sheer beauty, and it will be the first essential release of the New Year." SHAKENSTIR (UK)

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Terran's 3 year in the making 'FULL MOON IN 3' is an ambitious concept album which has stretched Jennifer in many new and exciting dimensions. Haunting, achingly beautiful, and sometimes psychedelic, “Full Moon in 3" unravels as a deep universe of gorgeous string and mellotron arrangements, and even a surprise moment of hip-hop as she raps nakedly about a sexual 3 experience. The record is graced by some amazing talents including bassist Todd Sickafoose (Ani DiFranco) and was mixed by multiple Grammy award winner, Husky Hoskulds, (Tom Waits, Norah Jones, Fiona Apple). Produced by Jennifer Terran with loving assistance by David Simon-Baker.

PROFILE

Jennifer Terran was born, the fifth child of seven, in Los Angeles and grew up in the 70’s on a dead end street in North Hollywood.

Her mother Adele Kathryn was an intense, passionate woman - an artist, dancer, and singer. She met Jennifer's father while singing in a nightclub. Her father is Tony Terran, a Sicilian trumpet player who was born in Buffalo, New York. He got stuck in Los Angeles when the leader of his touring big band refused to pay for his return fare to New York. Having no choice but to stay in Los Angeles, at 18 he landed a gig as a band member on the “I love Lucy Show”. This began his successful career which spanned over 10,000 records, television sessions, and motion pictures. He played with nearly every influential musician and band on the planet from the Beatles, Frank Zappa and Ella Fitzgerald to the Star Trek soundtrack. He was almost always the loudest instrument in the mix.

Jennifer did her first featured home concert in her living room when she was four. She performed in several musical theatre productions, and was five when she started her first entrepreneurial business selling “back scratches” to her family members for five cents a pop. A favorite pastime was singing songs from the 70’s song books while her oldest sister April accompanied her on piano.

The family broke up with a divorce when Jennifer was eight which began a series of moves with her mother, older siblings, and stepfather. She began taking piano lessons at nine, intending to accompany herself singing. Though classical lessons grated, she was deeply moved by music and by singing in particular. Jennifer first tasted the rush of being on stage at age nine when she performed in the school talent show singing a song from “The Muppet Show.” Her best friend was brought to tears, and it was at that moment she began to embrace the idea of making music her life's work.

At twelve Jennifer was discovered. A record producer was convinced he could make her into the next big kid star. She worked in his studio non-stop recording old cheesy pop songs. The producer sat in the control room crying from the raw charge and emotion in her young voice. The project was interrupted by her mom’s decision to move to a small town in Utah. From an existence of recording sessions with dad in the concrete, smog filled Los Angeles valley she went to the smells and sights of hay, families with thirteen children, and Mormon churches on every street corner.

Soon after the move, Jennifer’s mother became ill. Jennifer and her sister Eve, who had always carried adult responsibilities, cared for her baby siblings while her mom and stepfather visited natural health clinics across the West. Five months later her mother died at age forty-one. The cause of her death remains something of a mystery. The official diagnosis was Leukemia, though many believe that she was an early victim of the as-yet-unknown AIDS epidemic. She had received blood transfusions a year earlier at the birth of her last child. After her mother died, Jennifer moved back to Los Angeles to live with her father.

From there it was more recording with the big producer guy and his cheesy songs, school talent shows, and the Hollywood nightclub showcase and audition scene. It was also at this time that Jennifer started acting, though she was not very good at it.

At fifteen Jennifer left the Mormon church in which she'd been raised. She was the first in her family “to see the light” - a path which, over the years, the rest of the family would follow. By this time Jennifer's playing had taken a looser, more self-developed approach. By the time she was seventeen, she was craving normalcy and a break from the identity she had built around music. She went to University of California Santa Barbara and earned a bachelor degree in Sociology, graduating with honors.

During her college years, Jennifer left music behind. She developed a love affair with long distance running and ran seven marathons. In her last race, the Los Angeles Marathon, she placed third in her age group. She taught aerobics and hip-hop dance and started several small businesses. She was busy, but she also suffered from music withdrawal. On the day after graduation, Jennifer began writing her own music for the first time.

The first songs that came out were very personal and complex though she was ignorant of music theory. She wrote dozens of songs in that first year and developed her own beautiful and strange way with harmony and dissonance. She had several bands including “Puppet Show” and “Grizelda” while also playing solo piano/voice concerts in a local café.

Several demos later, she began making her debut album “Cruel” with the help of engineer Julie Last (Joni Mitchell, Ricki Lee Jones, Shawn Colvin) who co-produced and engineered half the record with her. The other songs were raw one-takes, recorded with a local engineer. She played a bunch of shows in California as an indie artist and received some strong recognition for her raw intensity, authenticity, beautiful voice and strange, original pop songs. Chris Douridas featured her on KCRW’s “Morning Becomes Eclectic”. He also felt her music should be signed to a record deal, so he played it for David Geffen who was rumored to have said she was “amazing! but wow, so intense”.

Jennifer started recording again right away and one year later released her very playful and quirky EP, “Rabbit”. At this time she launched an independent music festival called F.A.T. (Female Artist Tour) which played a series of concerts in California.

THE MUSICIAN ERA

Disenchanted with the music industry and sick of advice on how to be more “commercial”, Jennifer retreated to her bedroom and began making the lush and epic concept album “The Musician”. She bought some home studio equipment, borrowed some vintage tube microphones and an old analog twelve-track and began the intense process of learning recording, producing and mixing. Though the process was a challenge, it was equally liberating to begin painting the recorded sound herself, a process that felt to her just as important as the songs and performances themselves. Her recording style was just as unique, quirky and deeply personal as her music.

Jennifer treated "The Musician" with the utmost secrecy, and never shared it with anyone but the musicians recording in her room.

“I didn’t want anyone’s praise or criticism getting in the way of what was proving to be a very pure, authentic experience. The only thing that mattered was getting the music and the mixes to feel right to me. There’s always this notion that you should get peoples feedback on what you are recording or writing and I had come to the point where I felt this to be totally irrelevant to what I was after. This was the whole point of the record as a concept album as well... to follow the still inner voice. And somewhere in the back of my head, I knew that if the music was moving me, I wouldn’t be the only one. It was a very happy time in my creative life… one that didn’t involve other ears.”

"The Musician" was completed in late 2000 and she toured the West Coast for about a year until a well-respected music publication in the Netherlands, Heaven Magazine, discovered it online. "The Musician" was named album of the year, and the editor said “I’d trade in all my Tori Amos CD’s for Jennifer Terran’s The Musician”.

Jennifer and Brendan Statom, her partner on double bass, jumped on a plane and began an unplanned and extraordinary tour of Europe. One year later, Rounder Records, a major European label, licensed the album. Her homemade album received accolades across the continent and made many critics' "best-of" lists, including “Second Best Album of the year” in THE TIMES (London) and four-stars in Rolling Stone. Several tours followed with sold out concerts across Europe.

FULL MOON in 3

The next several years, Jennifer went through some massive life changes: a divorce, a second marriage, and the birth of her first child, Phoebe Moon Ray. She also put out her first live CD, “Live From Painted Cave” which captured a long tradition of intense and intimate home concerts. The live album features songs from her prior albums as well as renditions of other artists' work, including Cohen’s “Halleluja”, ”Streets of Loredo”, and “Que Sera.”

It was during these 3 years that she was conceiving and recording “Full Moon in 3”, another ambitious concept album which stretched her in many new and exciting dimensions. Haunting, achingly beautiful, and sometimes psychedelic, “Full Moon in 3” was unraveling as a deep universe of gorgeous string and mellotron arrangements, and a surprise moment of hip-hop as she raps nakedly about a sexual 3 experience.

Some of Jennifer's thoughts on Full Moon in 3:

“The process of making “Full Moon in 3” was a very epic, sensual, synchronistic time period where my thoughts and dreams would echo in real life. Maybe I would think of a friend I hadn’t seen or thought of in many years and all of a sudden they would walk up my driveway. Or the music would be raging in every cell of my mind and body and there in the middle of nowhere would appear the number 3 written on the pavement.

"If this music could look like something, then it would be what you see from Camino Cielo, the high ridge above Santa Barbara, where there are no cars or houses. On one side, you can see down to the ocean with the islands and our small city with its bittersweet human drama. Being at a distance from it and surrounded by nature, you gain perspective on the pretense we have as people. In nature, there is no pretense. It’s all accepting.

"On the other side of the ridge, you see the back country… big, glorious California mountains… looking just how they looked hundreds, maybe thousands of years ago. It would be dusk and the moon would be rising and the sun setting. This is a small snapshot of what the spirit and the power of 'Full Moon in 3' captures for me”

Jennifer will be releasing the record in Europe with a tour this autumn. So far, it’s a very independent release and promotional effort. Plans are underway for some shows in the US and New York where she will be playing for the first time. In the meantime, her next record is all written and waiting for the right moment to be put to tape. More info: www.jenniferterran.com

PRESS QUOTES

(complete articles at www.jenniferterran.com)

"Endowed with a voice or heartbreaking purity and melodic talent, Jennifer Terran will most likely rise rapidly to the level of the greats.”

TELARAMA (Paris, France)

"Breathtaking... timeless... pure... monumental.... Categorizing Jennifer Terran is impossible. Terran is a style of her own."

OOR MAGAZINE – (Netherlands)

"Haunting and intense, she sounds like a rawer version of Tori Amos. But Terran possesses a uniquely fierce and uncommon uncompromising voice"

UNCUT - (London, UK)

“Terran is a breathtaking singer. Her vocal innuendos are pure, free of the mannerism of a lot of contemporary female colleagues."

FOCUS - (Belgium)

"Jennifer Terran is an unusual, very unusual kind of artist and quite a woman! A truly magnificent Film Noire Diva and a world-class songwriter-singer. This woman is unique, captivating vocalist, pianist, tenderly rebellious songwriter, producer by raison d'etre and necessity, hip-hop dynamic instructor and dancer, story-teller, an existentialist philosopher, an emotionally and intellectually charged teaser and provocative presence and most certainly a daring-devil entrepreneur."

HERALD TIMES PARADE – (London, UK)

"Not everybody can be both scary and vulnerable; Jennifer Terran (pronounced tearin') can. The scary part is her voice, which spirals into regions so high you fear she'll disappear or crash, and lately it has acquired a diamond-dust edge that can saw through a stack of hearts, first of all her own."

LA WEEKLY – (USA)

"If Jennifer Terran has a voice as much incomparable as unforgettable, it is because she is also that in real life. Her authentic and sensual voice awakes up in us emotions so deep inside that thinking of it makes nearly crying of pain or joy, as if truth had a price."

MURMURES – (Switzerland)

"At some point Tori Amos had that same gift, but in the meantime she has become a phenomena… Let's hope that Jennifer Terran will never become world famous."

PLATOMANIA – (Netherlands)

"Pure, that was this concert in one word. No setlist, no décor, only a small lady, with a voice like a storm behind the piano”

STORYVILLE MAGAZINE – (Netherlands)

"The music of Jennifer Terran is so beautiful it hurts."

CULTURE – (Netherlands)

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT JENNIFER TERRAN, PLEASE EXPLORE THE WEBSITE www.jenniferterran.com or...myspace.com/jenniferterran

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