For every Nikki Lane and Margo Price, there is a Courtney Marie Andrews- one who soars beneath the bigger headlines yet has a songbook that rivals that of those selling out theaters. Throw Karen Jonas into the latter category where her angelic vocals and mix of gritty Americana and brass pop will rear her into one of many artistic categories.
Jonas’s sixth LP, The Restless (out Mar. 3), is a dark alt-country exploration of vulnerability that Glide is premiering in full below. Each song is a confession that lands somewhere between nostalgia and doom. This mix of playful longing and earnest heartbreak crescendos into the B-side opener “Rock the Boat,” which leaves Jonas prepared to walk straight into a river. From there the record unfolds with picturesque bravado reminiscent of Iris DeMent and Rosanne Cash.
“The record tells a story, but it isn’t linear,” Jonas says. “There are throughlines: this collection of dreamy, raw, romantic, and ill-fated stories. It’s important to me that the songs don’t judge the stories, they just dig in, leaving you to draw your own conclusions.”
Album opener “Paris Breeze” sets the tone with a mysterious tryst in a Parisian hotel: “it grows suffocating here with you near enough to touch me in the bedsheets / we’re breathing lavender and jasmine and the dust that’s fallen off of some great painting.”
Jonas’s fate was determined when her father played Joni Mitchell’s Miles of Aisles at her childhood home in Damascus, Maryland. “I was 16. I remember sitting next to the turntable and thinking, ‘I don’t really know what she’s doing, but whatever it is, I want to do that.’ I got a guitar and I’ve been trying ever since.” She moved to Fredericksburg, Virginia after graduating from the University of Maryland with a degree in English.
Jonas and her band tour non-stop. They were awarded Best Country/Americana artist by the Washington (DC) Area Music Awards three times, featured at SXSW and UK Americanafest, and nominated for an Ameripolitan Award.
