Photo Courtesy of Kaiti Jones
Through her confessional, heartfelt brand of folk, Boston’s Kaiti Jones is equal parts storyteller and biographer. Having already released two EPs and albums since 2009 Tossed is a deeply personal journey of resilience and reflection. What truly stands out in Jones’ music is her songwriting ingenuity. Tossed, released on March 5th, is Jones at her best as a songwriter, crafting melodies and timelessly intimate lyrics that invite the listener into her world and make them feel at home.
Over the course of the stylistically diverse nine track album, Jones grapples with the news of her mom’s cancer diagnosis on the title track, questions a rigid evangelical Christian culture on the piano drenched ballad “Mystic,” and analyzes her own insecurities on “Gettin’ around to it.” While staying true to her deep storytelling and folk roots, Jones evolves her sound, touching upon rock and pop.
Jones has spent the last month hard at work promoting Tossed. As most performers can attest to, being a musician during a global pandemic requires a lot of work. With venues shuttered, Jones turned to Club Passim to do a livestream album release on March 5th. “Passim is a venue and community that I have been a close part of for the last few years and [they] have been a huge supporter and champion of me and my endeavors. They’ve been amazing.” She told AP. Performing with a full band on stage was refreshing, says Jones, “It was awesome to not just be in my bedroom with my computer and me.” Another silver lining of online streaming shows is that she can share her music with people from all over the world. Jones’ Club Passim live stream saw viewers from South Korea, Hong Kong, Europe, and Brazil among other places. “That was kind of a trip.” Said Jones.
Photo courtesy of Kaiti Jones
Jones’ songwriting process also plays into the intimacy and timing of her final musical products. “You can look at a process and think ‘this is very intentional’ or this is ‘accidental and unrefined’ and I think what I’ve talked about is I take a lot of time between records… I take a lot of time in writing songs. Sometimes I’ll have a couple new songs in a month and sometimes I’ll have one new song in a year.”
The album’s title track, Tossed tells the story of her mom’s cancer diagnosis and a formative trip to San Diego where Jones rented a surfboard and headed into the ocean; “three years ago, it was right about this time, spring 2018, I found out that my mom was sick and quickly we learned it was a type of blood cancer called Multiple Myeloma… I had just started a new job a few months prior and had already been assigned to go to a conference for my job out in San Diego and it happened to be the weekend that my mom was starting chemo in Portland, ME. So it literally felt as far as possible away from my mom in a particular time when I wanted to be right next to her…”
Jones headed to the beach with a rented surfboard and hit the ocean. “I don’t think the point of this outing was to hone my surfing skills.” She said, “The point was to be alone, to be able to feel all the things and to throw myself at the mercy of the pull of the earth, and the universe, and God, and all the things I have no control over. The actual act of being thrashed around by massive waves felt like a very visceral metaphor. That was one of the moments where the song just started writing itself while I was out there and I started chipping away at it until I had a story to tell.”
Tossed is a visceral, personal look into where Jones was mentally and spiritually during that spring three years ago. As she sings, her lyrics sound like a voicemail from a dear friend, comforting and painfully honest: “As I tumbled to the bottom /I felt the ocean grip me tight / And the current like a tempest / Pulled me left and tore me right / And the undertow did take me / To the place where I belonged.”
To support Kaiti Jones, you can purchase Tossed via the artist’s Bandcamp, Rough Trade Records, or in person at Vinyl Index at Bow Market in Somerville, MA.