Jennifer Niceley tries to put aside her doubts and fly
by Joe Tarr
Jennifer Niceley isn't crazy about promoting her music. There's something that feels somehow wrong about it all. She's afraid that people will think she craves attention or believe she thinks she's something special. It's a self-consciousness that tends to haunt writers and musicians, especially the singer-songwriter types given to introspection.
"There's so much bad music and a lot of times people are doing it just for fame or money," she says. "For a long time, I used to use that as an excuse...I was above getting any recognition. It was somehow more noble to just keep playing and writing songs. Some people are born performers and love the spotlight. I'm not really like that.
"It's been hard the last couple of years because I was so self-defeating. I didn't feel I had the right to try to get attention for my music," she says. "I've had to talk myself into putting all my energy into it."
But, after living for short spells in a couple of different cities—Charleston, S.C., Santa Fe, and New York—Niceley has came to appreciate how important music is to her. While living in all of those cities for about six months each, she kept writing songs and playing guitar, but rarely performed live. Niceley started to realize that people she met and friends she made had no idea she was a musician.
"That felt horrible, like no one knew who I was at all. It wasn't about me being great. It was just eye-opening to know my identity and feelings of self-worth were wrapped up in my music."
Back in Knoxville after several years away, Niceley is making an effort to get her music heard. She's playing out more and has recently compiled an eight-song EP called, gone. And that's good, because Niceley's unique music is worth noticing. It's dreamy and exquisite, at turns sad and lighthearted. Her style draws equally from classic pop and jazz divas and '70s singer-songwriters.
It was the best of that later era's singer-songwriters, Joni Mitchell, who first inspired Niceley to write music. She was 11 or 12 and had already been writing poetry and playing guitar. But she found Ladies of the Canyon, and everything changed. "The songs were all poems, the way the words were written out, unlike all the pop music I'd listened to. And my dad taught me to play guitar, but he taught me a bunch of guys' songs. It was cool for me to learn a woman's songs. Also, listening to it, the music was just beautiful."
Her family is from Jefferson County, and Niceley first made a splash on the Knoxville scene in the mid-'90s, fronting the band Soul Penny. Niceley's played solo ever since, but she's now playing with a band. On gone, she recorded with Pete Cummings on bass, Wurlitzer piano and electric guitar, Derrick Greene on drums, and Rebecca Stout and her sister, Anna Niceley, backing her vocally.
The accompaniment beautifully complements Niceley's rich, warm voice. Thematically, many of her songs deal with naturalism and life. That's always been a subject for her, but living at her family's farm with her husband has brought it out even more.
"I write a lot about the landscape and what it means to me and how everything is slipping away. That sounds like folk singer talk, but it really does affect me," she says. "I take a lot of walks at my family's farm. It keeps me from getting depressed and helps me feel connected. Now, there are tracts of land around our farm that are being developed."
"Ghost of a Road" is about an old road going up a mountain that had been reclaimed by the forest, but it's also about the metaphorical road of Niceley's life.
Like many naturalists, Niceley has a yearning to be more at one with nature and the world, but also knows that she's forever separated from it. "Something I Can't Have" has the line, "Everybody knows you cannot touch wild things/ You can only come so close."
"I see a lot of wild animals at our farm. And I think, 'Oh, my God, how could something still be wild and be afraid of me?' There's a desire to be closer to it, but I never will," she says. "It's learning how to accept what you can't change."
"Golden Wings" also touches on the desire and inability to connect with the world—"My side of the mountain is cloaked in blue/ And the nights get cold but the stars always shine through/ And the days are full and free/ My days are free and freedom can be a dangerous thing/ It can mean that you got a rope to hang yourself/ It can mean that you got golden wings, golden wings."
It's clearly a statement of the choice Niceley sees herself faced with, a future filled with possibility as well as doubt.
"My goal is to just be confident enough that what I'm doing is genuine and not be affected by what people think," she says.
March 28, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 13
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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