Even as she surveys heartbreak and self-doubt, Jenn Wasner’s second solo album sounds confident. Textural layers of guitar and synth offer depth, yet allow her voice to lead the way.
At the start of the pandemic, Jenn Wasner found herself contending with a solitude she hadn’t expected. The self-described workaholic had long participated in the capitalistic churn that equates productivity with worth: In the years since her debut album as Flock of Dimes, 2016’s If You See Me, Say Yes, she’d recorded and released two albums with her band Wye Oak; toured as part of Bon Iver; and written a solo EP, 2020’s Like So Much Desire, among other pursuits.
Absent any tour or project to distract her, and still processing a recent heartbreak, her choices felt hollow. The end of her most recent relationship had set off questions she’d begun asking on Like So Much Desire, but in the solitary echo chamber of pandemic life, they infiltrated her larger sense of self. Doubts about who she’d let herself become, and the failure of that experiment, crowded the empty space.
But work, she knew; work, she could do. Wasner threw herself into writing, a process that came quickly over the spring months of 2020 and exposed her. Where once her ripping guitar solos signified her more vulnerable moments, her new album Head of Roses lets her voice lead the charge, each song refracting its light differently. Her vocals suffuse opening track “2 Heads,” a prismizer effect ballooning their resonance, while on “One More Hour,” she oscillates between reverb’d and dry vocals, claiming both spaces instead of relegating herself to just one.
Across the album, Wasner traces the uncertainty that results from letting someone else define you. “When you dressed me in a different skin/I forgot who I am,” she sings on the electric slow burn “Lightning.” However lost she may feel, her voice serves as a guide. Her vocal sustain resounds long and luxurious, while Adam Schatz’s (Landlady) sax conjures heat lightning. But that same anxiety—about the part she played in her own near-disintegration—returns on the bright, synth-pop track “Two,” turning almost caustic. “And we’re all just wearing bodies, like a costume, till we die,” she sings in her head voice.
What the relationship asked of her, and the ways in which she answered, comes across most clearly on the country-leaning “Awake for the Sunrise.” An acoustic guitar blends with the charred oak grain of her voice, opening stark space for the confession that follows: “I never thought I was a terrible liar/But I am when I need it most/Making a sorry attempt at compersion/With a hand halfway down my throat.” Wasner references the polyamorous trait of compersion, or the feeling of joy for a partner’s relationship with another—but admits it’s beyond her scope. As she sings on “Lightning,” though she envies the wild, dazzling freedom of electricity, it isn’t in her to live like that.
If Wasner needed to be on her own to make If You See Me, her new album benefits from conversation; she recorded it with Sylvan Esso’s Nick Sanborn at Betty’s in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, close to her Durham home. Sanborn’s production clears space for her voice, building each song around it rather than contorting it to fit. He makes Wasner sound fully at home.
Out of that ease, Wasner brings the guitar-centered indie rock of early Wye Oak alongside textural layers and deep synth bass reminiscent of Sylvan Esso; the electro-pop shine of her previous Flock of Dimes work alongside the bass- and synth-fueled sound that defined Wye Oak’s later music; and something new. “Hard Way” was meant to be a demo, something Wasner scaffolded with Sanborn before inviting more players to flesh it out, but the first version was so “perfectly odd” that they kept it. Against pacing synths, her voice fills the frame, searching and sorrowful, an instrument unto itself.
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