jessy lanza
The Canadian producer adding a strange, techno twist to neo soul
Jessy Lanza is one of those people who has spent much of her life in or around her hometown and has a particular relationship with it. Hamilton, Ontario is just over the Canadian border from Niagara Falls, on the shore of Lake Ontario, and also hemmed in by Lakes Huron and Erie. Much bigger cities like Toronto and Detroit are nearby – we’re talking North American distances, not European – but so is the Canadian wilderness.
“You don’t have to go far out of Hamilton to be in the middle of nowhere,” laughs the 37-yearold producer. “When you commune with nature in Canada, it can sometimes feel kinda overwhelming. There was a sense of space and melancholy that definitely filtered down into the music I make… songs with a sense of longing.”
Those songs were first gathered on Lanza’s acclaimed 2013 debut album, Pull My Hair Back, co-produced by Junior Boys’ Jeremy Greenspan, who just happened to be a Hamilton neighbour of Lanza’s. An album of burbling, ethereal soul set to a pared-down, almost techno-y soundtrack, Pull My Hair Back made the shortlist for that year’s Polaris Music Prize (Canada’s version of the Mercury Music Prize) and led to a collaboration with another Ontario native, the Grammy-nominated Caribou.
Lanza had definitely made her mark. Two more albums – 2016’s Oh No and 2020’s All The Time – were followed by a spiffing DJ-Kicks collection in 2021, but recording became increasingly difficult after Lanza moved out of her family home because… well, she no longer had a studio.
“Although you can do a lot inside the computer, I still like to use my analogue and modular synths,” Lanza explains further. “Writing, for me, is often about sitting in the studio for a few days, recording everything that happens. When you don’t have a permanent setup, that isn’t easy.”
After leaving Hamilton, Lanza moved to San Francisco, then New York for a while, then London, stayed with friends, and recently set up home in LA. The latest album, Love Hallucination, was literally put together on the hoof. Most of the vocals were recorded 10 feet off the ground in her brother-in-law’s childhood treehouse in San Francisco!
Atreehouse? Was that another attempt to commune with nature?
JL: “I suppose it did feel a bit like that. Sharing my space with birds and other wildlife. The room was actually much nicer than it sounds – aluxury treehouse – but recording the vocals did create a few problems. I gathered every spare duvet I could lay my hands on and had them covering the walls. Trying to get some sort of soundproofing. In the end, it didn’t really matter because the vocals got so messed around once they were in the computer. I wasn’t looking for the perfect ‘one take’ vocal. In fact, I don’t think I��
