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Jenny Doveson I don’t usually have to cover my keyboard when writing reviews, but because of profusely falling tears, I’d better, this time. Jenny Doveson made me. She dawned on me this morning, all of a sudden, from out of nowhere – like all desperately important occurrences. A police officer friend of mine emailed me Jenny Doveson’s MySpace address… and then the shocks kept hitting me hard, tearing away all of my defenses, uncovering “All These Wasteful Hours”, and cutting straight through to a younger place within me, which has remained through the years. Jenny Doveson is just 20 years old, and how she has come to know this folk music tradition of the likes of Donovan Leitch and Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie and Judy Collins, I cannot fathom. She has done this, none the less, and further more; in this little hometown of mine, in which I went through similar discoveries more than forty years ago - and perhaps that is what devastates me, in a happy sense; tears me apart in a sort of lustful pain, as I remember myself vividly and sharply contoured through these barren anonymous streets in the 1960s, bursting with longing and inspiration, always accompanied by the voices and the poetry and the attitudes of Dylanesque enfants terrible and Donovan bards through meandering rhymes of holiness and sorrow, lacklove and heroic escapes. As I listen to Jenny Doveson on MySpace I read about her influences, which include Robert Johnson, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Howlin' Wolf, Donovan, Billie Holiday, Mississippi John Hurt, Kingston Trio, Janis Joplin, Odetta, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, A. Rimbaud, T.S. Eliot, Velvet Underground, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Gertrude Stein, Emmylou Harris, Leadbelly, Leonard Cohen, Bessie Smith, Sam Cooke, Simon and Garfunkel, Otis Redding and Nina Simone Dylan was but 20 when he cut his first album, in New York City in 1961, hitting Manhattan from his rural Hibbing of the Mesabi Iron Range of Northern Minnesota. Jenny Doveson, who definitely reveals a kindred creative force and a similar sparkling beauty of talent and head-on ingenious intuition, lays down her first album in the winter of 2008 – 09 and in the spring of 2009, in her 20th year, bursting upon the Stockholm scene – and the international arena – from rural small-town Nyköping of Sweden. What is it with these tiny towns?
There is nothing stale or old-fashioned about Jenny Doveson’s art, make sure! She does not merely pick up on a bygone world to capitalize on it, uh-huh! She has found a form which fits her, and which allows for her special writing and singing; a form that receives her gifted expressions fully and returns a heartbreaking beauty of the soul, with many dark strands through the tapestry of strumming, fingerpicking and wailing harmonica figures. Not only does she perform her songs in a compelling brilliance, which undoubtedly touches more hearts than mine, but she also opens the gates on a state of mind that’s been all but forgotten for decades, but which harbors the force of a hurricane, the might of “a wave that could drown the whole world”, now flowing, fully-fledged, from the strings of Jenny’s guitar, from her vibrating vocal cords. When I woke up this morning I was oblivious of the existence of this young woman of my own hometown, and as the evening sun sets I’ve been changed by her, as I was caught unawares, suddenly feeling all the wild emotions of my youth in this anonymous rural town, with a few beatnik pals in derelict houses in the 1960s and 70s, and the songs of Hamilton Camp, Shel Silverstein, Eric Andersen, Phil Ochs, Richard Farina, Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Tom Rush, Tom Paxton, Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Donovan, Essra Mohawk etcetera – in a fresh, new way… and I had no defenses, no time to think! It is said that when you die you see your whole life in one breathtaking glance – and in a way this is how Jenny Doveson and her songs affect me now, and perhaps that is why my emotions are so strong, causing me to weep, though not unpleasantly. In her songs and not least her singing I sense my life in all its richness and fullness, and for that I am forever indebted to her. Oh, this has been a lonesome day, and an important one! I really do feel different, having been cast into this senseless turmoil of thoughts and emotions, unlocked from the abyss of my subconscious by Jenny Doveson and her songs! Her career should be an international one from the very start, no doubt. She is one of those rare artists who can sing in an international lingo – English – without sounding like a put-on or a letdown. She is perfectly comfortable with that, and I’d rather look upon her as international right off, even though she’s opened the windows onto the all but forgotten provincial streets of my youth!
Jenny Doveson’s songs have befallen me deeply personally, but even with all that left aside, her art carries, stands its own ground, in sincere beauty, in vocal and instrumental brilliance all through her complex and intricate writing. One of her songs that immediately hits home, and will be a classical tune, is All These Wasteful Hours, which begins very much like Donovan’s initial bars of Catch The Wind. Much of her fingerpicking skill is used in this song, but Jenny doesn’t sing like Donovan, although she plays like him. If you have to make comparisons, I’d say she sings a bit like Buffy Sainte-Marie in this wonderful song; All These Wasteful Hours. But who plays the banjo in addition to the guitar? It sounds too live and alive and immediate for Jenny to have added the banjo afterwards. It gives a lovely ring to this strutting, limping marching tune! Jenny practices a lot of silky skills in here; little things you may not even notice unless you are seriously captured, like her slowing down slighty at one place to stress a certain passage, for example. This is brilliant playing! I Will Think Of It All is another very impressive piece of song writing. Jenny’s picking mimics Woody Guthrie heavily here, and this is nothing she tries to hide, and why should she, she plays beautifully. It really makes me happy to listen! I’m Getting Cold Mama is more of a slow, introverted blues melody, dark and rancid, sporting guitar and the occasional wailing harmonica, Jenny straining her voice in a pain that sure sounds pure, in stanzas like “they say I’m too young, but then, why am I feeling so old?” I’ve Been Picking Some Flowers starts out in the most precious finger-picking mode, reminding me of the beginning of Girl From The North Country by Bob Dylan on his Freewheelin’ album from 1963. Dylan himself built this song on the harmonics and atmospheres of the traditional song Scarborough Fair. Jenny Doveson keeps renewing the tradition. The song remains in a Simon & Garfunkel idiom, but this only an observation; Jenny Doveson stands her own ground, you’d better be aware! The Stranger is a rough and mysterious bit, with lines like: “You can see in his eyes, he’s got a long story to tell; his feet are bare naked, his body just a shell”. Who Knows is another carefully crafted song, harmonically adhering to early Simon & Garfunkel, and Jenny lets a Dylan homage slip through her writing, nodding into the direction of the Maestro in the words “The Restless Hungry Feeling” (Dylan: One Too Many Mornings) – and it’s a wonderfully flowing song. I’m in awe watching this talent bud and bloom so quickly and fully. Somebody said, in a comment on MySpace almost a year ago: “She’s a genuine undiscovered songwriter of our time, and another timeless time” – and that’s exactly it, although she won’t remain undiscovered!
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