A wandering man

The past decade has been rough for musicians. A business model which carried the music industry for half a century is collapsing, and in the hastily re-imagined marketplace, no one is quite sure what will be rising from the ashes of a fading system of pop superstars and blockbuster record releases.

At the beginning of this industry-wide shock, it was hypothesized that the fall of the major label system would lead to the rebirth of a wandering troubadour type who would rely more on hand to mouth donations than recording royalties for his livelihood. While this idea has panned out in a myriad of different variations, there has been some return to the pre-1920s conception of a traveling folk musician.

And Portland songwriter Nick Jaina is making music that not only suits that ideal, but also actually benefits from its populist trappings.

After dropping out of college in the mid-90s, Jaina took to a wandering self-education that would lead him from San Francisco to New Orleans and back again as he traversed the United States at the insistence of whims and interminable wanderlust.

“I just didn’t have a home for a couple of years,” Jaina said. “I grew up in Sacramento and … you can’t really have any perspective on that until you get outside of it, and then you’re like ‘Oh! So that’s what Sacramento sounds like’.”

After working on a short songwriting career in San Francisco, Jaina penned a tune with the refrain “When I die, they won’t even bury me” and took this line as incentive enough to send him searching for a place where they truly would not bury him after he died. This sudden spasm of inspiration landed him in New Orleans, where the swamplands make aboveground graveyards a necessity. At this time Jaina was able to absorb the rich traditions of jazz and Americana into his songwriting.

“I never would have thought of it consciously,” Jaina said, “but I listen to my music now … and there’s obviously some New Orleans elements in there.”

Eventually these wanderings came to a close in 2001, when Jaina arrived in Portland ready to apply his half-decade of education in the American musical subconscious to the process of creating his own music.

Taking on a more nostalgic feel than his original Portland band, The Binary Dolls, Jaina set out to making music based around his acoustic songwriting and was quick in collecting collaborators to breathe life into his aggressive, intellectual folk.

In an ironic twist, Nick Jaina’s solo recordings have proven to be the most communal and inclusive of his career, offering thick arrangements that hum with the gritty energy of his small orchestra and threaten to entangle anyone within listening distance.

“We sort of ended up in San Francisco and we found this great place to play on the street,” Jaina said of the group’s recent tour. “We just sort set up, and people just gathered around and laughed and danced. It was amazing.”

This instance of collective psychosis is emblematic of Jaina’s populist folk, which carries an old-world energy half born of talent and half built from the manic “county fair” energy of his band. Still crisscrossing the States and still inciting impromptu performances in the streets, Nick Jaina may well be a modern rebirth of the folk troubadour.

Nick JainaWoolHush Records, 2008**** (out of five)

Given the genre’s monumental back catalog, it is difficult for anyone laboring in the sonic neighborhood of “singer-songwriter” to come up with music that is either original in content or captivating in execution. If it has really “all been done,” then the real accomplishment is in doing it right, which is something that folk songwriter Nick Jaina has never had a problem with.

Though his latest album, Wool, covers the quiet paths already well trodden by the likes of Elliott Smith, Jaina brings a maturity and painstaking focus to the territory which is missed by most of the genre’s imitators.

Perhaps Jaina’s greatest strength is as a lyricist, and the quiet ballads of Wool provide an excellent bare-bones showcase for his songwriting skills. From the record’s haunting opening salvo of “This is a song for Maryanne / Died at birth in her grandfather’s hands” to its mournful closer, “Lonesome Blues,” Jaina proves his ability time and again to layer complicated meaning into every line.

When viewed as a whole, these intricate metaphors work together to create a dense and thematically complex group of songs.

Though Wool is devoid of the barnburners–Jaina’s trademark in the past–it still retains the intelligent core, which made those songs worthwhile in the first place. The lack of pyrotechnics on Wool may turn off some listeners who would have responded better to Jaina’s more energetic work, but true devotees of this Portland songwriter will find his melancholy wit intact on this album, even if it is wrapped in more subtle packaging.