Jordie Lane is always getting caught in a downpour. “A quick storm just hit while I was getting my coffee,” he says with an unquenchable, good-natured humor. The much loved Australian indie roots artist, who recently moved from Melbourne to LA to Nashville, is malleable and resilient despite the torrent of changes that have come his way. His upcoming release, Glassellland, to be released September 7, 2018 internationally, combines the desert Tropicalia influences of his homeland with the modern Southwestern folk of his new home.
Produced by Clare Reynolds (Timbaland, Haley Reinhart, Greyson Chance), the two created Glassellland in teardown transitory studios, which they built and deconstructed in varying spaces in Northeast Los Angeles. “With the studio doubling as a kitchen, and no door to the bedroom, there was really no escaping the music.” On top of building the studio space, they also engineered and played every sound on the album, making the endeavor highly personal. “Clare comes from an operatic background and was a trained opera singer in Australia, so she comes from a totally different school of thought to me songwriting-wise and production-wise,” says Jordie. “She just knew when a song was ready to record and knew when we got the take. That’s something I could never work out on my own.”
“Los Angeles is making me feel a little sedated,” says Jordie about the city he recorded in. “It’s blue skies every day, so you don’t know what you’re feeling. It’s almost like being on way too many antidepressants. It doesn’t feel real.” Perhaps this is why Jordie opted to sleep when the California sun was shining and work through the grungy LA night while recording the album. “Something starts to wake up in me past midnight. By the time you get to 6am and you’ve stayed up all night, you start to go into a delirious, maybe somewhat delusional state of mind.” This is how he escaped the limits of structured creativity: by wandering the neon-lit streets at midnight, as if someone out of a Jim Jarmusch film.
However, wandering for the sake of creativity is not a new concept for Jordie. His parents, who met while performing in a traveling Australian circus troupe, filled Jordie’s first memories with unconventionality. It’s no wonder then that Jordie is so comfortable with escaping the rigid elements of day-to-day life and why, when he saw the Glassell Park neighborhood’s Glassellland sign, he was moved to create an album from it. The sign, which is an ironic take on LA’s original Hollywoodland sign, instantly made Jordie feel more at home in sometimes alien, too-pristine surroundings. “Instantly, the sign became the symbol for the album before we’d even started writing,” says Jordie. “It was like a visual mantra that said: ‘Your dreams are endless!’ But the difference was it was not all glossy and fake Hollywood. It was a mundane, regular working class, real, gritty neighborhood reminding me of Thornbury, the neighborhood I grew up in.”
From a melding of genres, influences, and backgrounds, Glassellland is the product of an outsider immersing himself in unfamiliar territory, and loving every moment of it. Jordie Lane has created a record seeped in mystery, but the kind that happily divulges its secret after a few listens. “That’s what this record’s really about,” says Jordie. “Tying reality and fantasy together.”