Coming of Age With Jane Ellen Bryant

From deep inside the pile of CDs, cassettes, records, and other promotional ephemera the postman delivered, an entrancing pair of brown eyes stared out at me. The peepers belonged to one Jane Ellen Bryant, a young local in heavy makeup and messy hair who seemed to be sinking into a mound of children's toys.

Jane Ellen Bryant on the turntable (Photo by Kevin Curtin)

I receive lots of ostentatious promo material from Austin musicians. Singer-songwriter Matthew Squires once sent me a used George Foreman grill with his name stenciled on it. For months, the band Full Service mailed in comics often featuring Chronicle Music staffers as characters. Nothing screamed “Play me!” like Bryant’s multicolored 7-inch vinyl picture disc.

I’m not sure if it was the curiously awkward cover art or just knowing how expensive small-run picture discs are, but I felt obligated to watch Bryant and her stuffed animals spin in a circle while listening. When the needle dropped onto the face of a pink kitty cat, “Twenties” emitted a coming-of-age ballad for the hot mess set where the young Austin native bemoans working a “shitty first job,” waking up in the wrong bed after a drunken Tuesday night, and an overall lack of direction:

“Your best friend’s getting married.
And she swears that she’s ready.
And you can’t find a date.
You’re stuck talkin’ to people you hate.
And they ask how you been.
What’s your job, where you live?
You say you just moved back in with your parents.”

It’s a songwriter-pop single with a capital S, reminiscent of indie darling Jenny Lewis and, more so, the sticky, mid-Nineties radio hits sung by songstresses like Sheryl Crow that feature attitude-driven talk/sung verses unfolding into absurdly catchy hooks.

“I had this idea my whole life that at 25 I’d have my shit together,” laughs Bryant, who wrote “Twenties” after returning from college in Nashville, unemployed and living with her parents. “No one warned us what it’d really be like.”

The newly released Twenties EP churns the bread and butter Americana that served as the main ingredient of Bryant’s 2013 debut Hourglass, spread thick with crafty pop and mainstream rock. Her agile vocals and ex-Bobby Jealousy guitarist Brian Patterson’s colorful fretwork highlight the new three-track effort, produced by Sixteen Deluxe/Young Heart Attack axe man and The Bubble studio owner Chris “Frenchie” Smith. When I ran into the veteran producer (currently working on a new Toadies LP) at Bryant’s EP release show upstairs in Lamberts last weekend, he lauded her unique talent, pointing out that no one of her generation has attempted “the Sheryl Crow thing.”

That night, Bryant closed the show with her millennial anthem, first cautioning, “You might see me in a video for this song looking real hungover.”