There is this really pernicious phenomenon currently happening in the music industry where musicians are conducting extremely surface-level psychoanalysis, adorning it with haphazardly poetic lyricism, and calling it vulnerability. The result is a sexless veneer of sentimentality that skims the surface of vulnerability just enough to achieve a modicum of relatability, but not enough to have the listener actually face truth. It’s ultimately a testament to our generation’s own capacity to acknowledge truth and to conduct real, penetrative self-reflection. 

North Carolina-born and LA-raised, Jordan Patterson’s music is the antithesis of this perversity. Her most recent project, Songs From a Valley Girl – a profoundly soulful reflection on shame, love, and the bridge between the two – imbues listeners with a certain kind of life force that is life-affirming. The EP is a vivification of the valley itself, sonically reflecting the frivolity of suburbia and the volatility of the city. “I admire [LA 's] moments of hospitality as well as its moments of complete rupture…I experience a lot of contradictions and dissonance because of that. But that's what allows me to experience beauty.”

Like LA, and like all of us, there is a plurality to Jordan’s interiority. Instead of effacing this dissonance, however, Jordan probes it, and her reflections are mimetic of LA’s geo-psychological landscape. “I think that you look at LA, which is an amalgamation of many things, but it's still so concretely one thing. There's no other Los Angeles in the world– I think that I can be that for my own self.”

This complexity is wholly reflected in her lyricism and her corporeally earnest sonic expression. In “QDS”, Jordan oscillates between profound yearning and romantic disillusionment: “I made a mess, I cleaned it up. I passed the test, I’m not in love. But as I roam the valley, I wonder, will true love ever find me.” In “Cinderella”, she chronicles all the polarizing emotional intensities that emerge in the pursuit of love: “I wanna do what’s good for me and you, but I feel my heart being torn, and placed in five different boxes all by the door.” Throughout the EP, Jordan oscillates between themes of history and self-renewal, sublimity and repulsion, and restraint and freedom to capture the multifariousness of experiencing shame. “The thing about shame is that, in it being a monster, it wants you to come inside,” she postulates.

Jordan fuses her ardent lyricism with the ethereality of her instrumentals, and her borderline primal singing style possesses the same sonic multiplicity that she conveys in her songwriting and music production. Every single facet of Jordan’s production is employed ever so intricately to convey the full breadth of her humanity, allowing the genius of her emotional clarity to liberate anyone who is listening. The universality of her lyricism, however, doesn't just manifest itself in its verisimilitude but in its capacity to adapt to whatever phase of life she or her listener is enduring. 

Currently, Jordan is in a transitional phase in her life: she’s working on her new album, she’s preparing for her tour as a supporting act for Julia Jacklin, and, come September, she’ll be moving from Los Angeles to Philadelphia. Given this transition and the space Jordan has taken away from her EP, she has begun to reflect on the plasticity of its meaning. “I think that the ideas of shame are ever evolving. I hope that's ever evolving— I'm choosing to see that as ever-evolving.” Jordan has described the EP as “just as much of a shame monster as a love monster,” using the EP to bring levity to the ever-pervasive nature of shame. “I feel like cellophane every time… I think it will continue to endure, and that's a sign that it is changing, because it once was a moment of being humbled, and then it was a moment of reflection, and then a moment of liberation.”

What Jordan’s music will always be, however, is her mode of coping with the faith-fear axis. “There's a lot of faith that you have to have in that this idea is going to be expressed the way that you want it to. That's why each song is a practice. And so you have to have a lot of faith that you get there, and then that is completely mirrored into day-to-day life." She attributes her ability to transmute fear into faith to her grandmother: “She is my faith. I look at her choices… and that gives me faith that you can transform any experience into what you want it to be. You can make it more beautiful. You can do a lot with a little.”

Jordan’s faith has propelled her to forge a burgeoning career in the music industry. Following her self-released debut album The Hermit, Jordan signed with Secretly Canadian and has opened for lauded acts like Cameron Winter, Folk Bitch Trio, Jens Lekman, and Searows. This weekend, she’s set to share the stage with Kevin Morby and Sharon Van Etten for Secretly’s 30th anniversary, and she is also playing with Lea Jaffe and Fernette at New York’s storied Nightclub 101. She will also be playing the End of the Road Festival on September 5th in the UK as well as the Evanston Folk Festival on September 12th. 

No matter what phase of her life we might find her in, though, Jordan has described herself as “perpetually ‘in progress.’” This is what I perceive to be the thesis of Jordan’s music and artistic identity: whatever renders it imperfect actually contributes to its beauty.

When I talk to Jordan about being a bona fide truth-teller and an unadulteratedly heart-oriented artist enduring an increasingly bloodless industry, her vitality and intrepid sensibility endure. “There's always, even if there is nothing to the naked eye, something to receive. Sometimes it's just the acknowledgment, the observation– that's enough. In this industry where it's full of taking, full of exploiting, you have to be willing to give something. And if I'm still willing to give something, I'm okay.” She clearly does not possess the same fatalistic mentality as I do, and her sentiments are absolved of virtually any ego. To her, music will always be a pursuit of service, a pursuit of something bigger. She resolves herself to this grander truth, and, now that I am grossly humbled, I listen to her posit her final prophetic offering: “If you want miracles to happen, you have to sacrifice what you think you know. And I want to co-exist with miracles. I want to co-create with the universe."

Photographed by Zenzelé

Styled by Korynn Washington

Hair & Makeup: Korynn Washington & Ava Lachini

Photo Assist: Audrey Wilkins