Ebru Yildiz
Texas-born singer-songwriter Jana Horn has announced her sophomore studio LP. The Window Is the Dream — the follow-up to her 2022 debut album, Optimism — is due out April 7 via No Quarter Records. News of the forthcoming record arrived today (January 31) alongside its lead single, “After All This Time.”
The new track is a pensive, methodical number, meticulously arranged with help from producer Jared Samuel Elioseff’s cello section. “Remembering is not the same / As looking back,” Horn reasons at the start of the song, setting up a nuanced portrait of memory, loss, and forgiveness. “After all this time / There is only so much / I can say for sure,” she sings later. “Experience has taken me / Into her arms again / Mother of my own making.”
The Window Is the Dream was mostly recorded with Elioseff at Pale Moon Sessions in Cambridge, New York, with additional tracks laid down alongside Craig Ross at Studio 4 in Austin. At the latter venue — still under construction at the time of the project’s creation — Horn was joined by old friends such as drummer Adam Jones (a frequent Bill Callahan collaborator) and guitarist Jonathan Horne. “They were making the studio at the time, so I was part of the process,” Horn explains in a press release. “I would be tiling the bathroom floor… during the breaks, or helping Adam install the toilets.”
Read Horn’s full statement on The Window Is the Dream, listen to “After All This Time,” and check out the album’s tracklist and cover art below.
From the desk of Jana Horn:
“The Window Is The Dream began as a failed poem. I wrote it as I was waking up… ‘The last thing I want in this breath of existence / is not to throw myself into it / as any bird might stop flying / when the window is the dream.” I think the original line was “toad breath.” My classmates were nice about it, even the teacher.
I was taking a class on esoteric lit, a fiction workshop, a poetry class. And while the poem wasn’t quite… a poem… a song did rise from it, like smoke from a fire put out. The song is called “The Dream,” which maybe the album is pointing toward. These recurring lines which depict the image of a bird hitting a window, though not out of oblivion, but because the bird knows something we don’t.
I think of a line from a favorite story of mine, [Denis Johnson’s] ‘Car Crash While Hitchhiking,’ in which a man is observing someone badly hurt, and about to go: ‘And therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth. I don’t mean that we all end up dead, that’s not the great pity. I mean that he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real.’
I won’t bore you with more quotes… but perhaps my idea with this song, and album, was in part to help keep this broader, ongoing conversation in the air, like a beach ball.
I wrote these songs in the thick of a writing program. I was reading all the time, sometimes five-hundred pages a week or more, there was no music on, for years maybe; my record player broke, the stereo in my car, my laptop was on its last speaker and then it started twitching. The feeling of those days was holding on, as though centripetal force alone was keeping everything going. Songs spilled. ‘Days go by / they don’t have time.’ Even the walks I took were circular, around the cemetery and back.
The Window Is the Dream tracklist
1. Leaving Him
2. After All This Time
3. Days Go By
4. The Dream
5. Love In Return
6. Old Friend
7. Song For Eve
8. In Between
9. Energy Go
10. The Way It Is
The Window Is the Dream cover art
Sam Sanford
