Jessy Lanza produces pristine pop music
The narrative given to future R&B riser Jessy Lanza has been nothing short of idyllic: With classical and jazz training under her belt the singer returned to her roots in Hamilton — the blue-collar town erroneously knighted as Ontario’s answer to Williamsburg or Bushwick. There she embraced electronic-leaning pop music in earnest eventually hooking up with Steeltown’s most-celebrated producers — Jeremy Greenspan of Junior Boys natch. A deal with massive U.K. electronic imprint Hyperdub followed. And Canada’s next emerging female vocalist was born. Right? Well not quite.
See while the press has been quick to categorize Lanza as a simple singer anyone who’s spent time with her debut Pull My Hair Back would tell you that her music is remarkably balanced: Yes her cascading vocals are swoon-worthy but they never overwhelm Lanza’s hip hop-inflected electronic R&B. And that’s because she’s as much of a singer as she is a producer.
“I’ve never really thought of myself as a singer or as a vocalist” she says. “Having really up-front vocals never appealed to me. I have this tendency to bury the vocals keeping them low in the mix.
“Some of my biggest influences are soul singers like Aretha Franklin and Evelyn King and funk-boogie stuff” she continues. “But I’ve never had a voice like that. I even had a singing teacher at a really young age who said ‘Well you’re not a belter.’ I’m not going to try to be a type of singer. It’s better to play to my strengths.”
Her strengths naturally involve performing the music most essential to her youth and while she studied jazz at Montreal’s Concordia University her academic life doesn’t inform her current creative process. “As jazz stuff goes sometime I go back to chords and ways to play [with] fancier jazzier chords” she says. “But I find it’s better not to use anything I learned in school. I find if you try to incorporate it it comes out sounding really bad. For me at least.”
So unlike the producers studying Mutek’s lineup she didn’t use electronic music as a conduit to jazz or neo-classical composition. In fact she went the opposite direction settling on the music she was obsessed with in middle school. “In everybody’s music experience growing up there’s this key period” she says. “When I was like 12 or 13 Missy Elliott and Timbaland came out and that was the music everybody listened to. I never stopped following mainstream R&B and that age period — when I was 12 to 17 — has been the touchstone of my influences…. It’s the music of my adolescence.”
When Lanza was handed a copy of Logic she decided to ditch her previous musical efforts — she says she dabbled with being a singer-songwriter before tiring of relying on full bands to execute her music — to explore production in full force. Through Hamilton’s music community (she cites buzzsaw punks TV Freaks D.I.Y. pop act WTCHS and quirky squee DJ Motëm as the city’s highlights) she began collaborating with Greenspan. Through the Junior Boys member she met Hyperdub’s Steve Goodman who’d eventually cut Pull My Hair Back . “Thankfully he was interested in putting out a record” Lanza says.
“I never really imagined talking about labels who would put out my songs. But I’m a huge fan of Hyperdub — I love Laurel Halo and [since departed footwork icon] DJ Rashad as well. It’s a dream label.”
