Glen Rose, Texas-born songwriter Jana Horn has announced a new album, The Window Is the Dream, which is set for release on April 7 via No Quarter. It follows her self-released 2020 debut Optimism, which the label reissued last year. Check out the lead single ‘After All This Time’, which features a cello arrangement by Jared Samuel Elioseff, below.
“I wrote Optimism at a very transient time in my life, when I was in no place at once and everything was slipping through my hands like a wet fish,” Horn said in a statement. The Window Is The Dream, on the other hand, “was written in one room, essentially. When you have nowhere to go, you go into memory, and memories of dreams… I was in a different headspace.” She went on to elaborate:
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, ‘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 Cover Artwork:
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
