Indie-pop musician JAWNY opened his January Zoom press conference hosted by associated students and Interscope Records with a track from his upcoming record; Fall In Love, the song which was released as a single this year, was melancholic, soulful. Soft, yearning vocals backed by mellow piano chords tell a story about yearning and lost love. “I don’t want to fall in love,” he repeats, crooning “She goes round my head like a cop car, Handcuffs on my heart I’m a prisoner.” The song is sad, of course, stating its speaker’s intention to stop feeling love, but it’s hard not to wonder about the juvenility of the speaker. His revelation that “If it’s love then you let her go,” comes off as hollow: the speaker is lamenting being left, so who’s letting go of who? Is letting someone you love go akin to letting them leave? Who is the prisoner?
The second track played for us, the central song, we’re told, is “Lalala,” opening with soft bass and guitar leading to a chorus of “la” and a fast-paced vocal opener about the beauty of falling in love fast and hard. “Now my heart sings a song about a boy who’s in love like this,” JAWNY sings, “I fell in love with an idea.” The song is a bit of a rollercoaster, in mimicry of the actual falling-down-the stairs feeling of falling for someone you barely know.
You start to be able to piece together a narrative thread in some of these songs: the hope and excitement of a new romance, and the ease with which you can forget the beauty of love when it all goes awry.
Some of this hurtling freight train feeling is mirrored in his own telling of his rapid rise to stardom as a musician in the last few years after his breakout TikTok hit “Honeypie” was used in over one hundred thousand videos. “You start thinking you need to recreate what you did, and need to capture lightning in a bottle again,” he said during the conference, reminiscing about his beginnings as a musician, “It was jarring to be successful all of a sudden, but at first it was hard to find stable footing. It must be really hard for younger people now that there are 16-year-olds blowing up on stuff like TikTok.”
JAWNY’s previous album For Abby(2020) is heavily pop-influenced, full of synth and electric guitar riffs. 2010s pop and dance music intertwines with more indie sensibilities to make a high-energy piece also focused on yearning love, but with less introspection and more bouncing energy. “I’m always hearing new melodies, I’m always hearing new chord progressions, I’m always hearing new genres,” he said about his songwriting process. The new record, JAWNY said, is a departure from For Abby, and from the singles, there is a marked difference.
With more funding from Interscope records, JAWNY says “I wanted to make the dream record that I wanted to make when I was 17,” and it shows; the album was a more emotional introspection about love, but the songs also confusing at times; finding a throughline can be difficult between songs, and this, I think, is very much part of his identity as a young, and still evolving artist. The emotional, and often creative confusion brought on by new love is felt in hopeful but also hectic ways in JAWNY’s new, high-fructose, technicolored record.
Tate McFadden is the Arts and Culture Editor and Opinion Editor For The Triton