Right On!: jennylee of Warpaint on her solo album

“You say it like, 'Right On! Right On!' I say it all the time. Good, groovy, right on, thumbs up… go for it. That’s why I put the exclamation point, to make sure people are saying it with some positivity, some enthusiasm!” Jenny Lee Lindberg takes attitude very seriously; the making of her first solo record right on! (titled with vital punctuation) is born of spirited risk-taking, of 'Fuck it! Why not?' 

If you’ve read The Skinny at least once in the last five years, there’s high odds you’ll have come across Lindberg’s work. As one quarter of LA indie band Warpaint, in previous years Jenny Lee has graced our front cover and taken the top spot on our end-of-year album lists. But now, in the closing months of 2015 (“It’s a strange time to release an album, isn’t it?”), she’s stepped away from her duties as a bassist, and as a founding member of the group, and taken some time to explore her own ideas.

When we invited Warpaint’s drummer Stella Mozgawa to predict the band’s future, roughly this time last year, she hinted at there being some surprises in store… could this be what she had in mind? “Oh really?!” Lindberg laughs. “She did?  Well yeah, I was working on this record then. I’d started writing before, when we’d come home from tour and had some time off… and some of the songs were even written a couple of summers ago. One year ago? Maybe two? Yeah, I would say that this has been in the making maybe two years, tops. It’s definitely time for me to share… to share music with the world! And it’s fun, because I’ve not really ever shared anything like this before.”

"I wasn’t going to play shows… but fuck that. I wanna tour" – Jenny Lee Lindberg

Under the lowercased moniker jennylee, Lindberg’s been posting fragments of tracks and split seconds of experimental video via her individual Twitter and Instagram accounts for several months – encouraging speculation of solo work with a trail of breadcrumbs, right up until the album’s official announcement. She’s clearly enjoying life in the driver’s seat, but given Warpaint’s heavy schedule and their immersive approach to record writing, surely it felt a little strange for Lindberg to split herself between two such demanding projects? And, moreover, how does she distinguish between ideas for Warpaint, and ideas for jennylee?

“Hmmm. It’s funny.” Lindberg pauses. “It’s funny because I get asked that question often. Like, how do I know if it’s a jennylee song? Basically… and I think it kind of goes the same for all of us [in Warpaint]… but if I write a song and I’ve got the bass line and a couple other ideas then cool, this is something for the band. Because then we can all take it somewhere, without it just being mine. If I write a song, and I’ve got the bass, the guitar lines, the vocals, the harmonies… then that’s mine to keep.”

It is funny – because it seems very likely that anyone who’s previously asked that question of Lindberg has had expectations of a floatier, more ethereal answer. Lindberg laughs again: “It’s how it goes with the rest of the girls, as well. Pretty basic stuff.”

As far as expectations go, right on! – on first listen – goes some way to fulfilling them. Opening track Blind begins with typically breathy, shadowed bass and the sense of space and ceremony which we know as characteristically Lindberg’s, consistent throughout Warpaint’s discography thus far. A similarly architectural approach runs through eerie, sexy slow-burners Long Lonely Winter and He Fresh... but then you run up against the record’s surprisingly sharp, antagonistic tracks, like Bully and Boom Boom.

And that's when you start to realise this record's not so easy to pin down. Single Never – a woozy, new-wave act of affirmation – offers further excellent example of right on!'s reluctance to stay still. Drawn up by grunge measurements and tinted with New Order-reminiscent hooks, it’s a moody, self-absorbed anthem of self-empowerment. Or, at least, it sounds that way – but even Lindberg’s not sure. “I mean… and I feel this with any song… it’s totally open to interpretation. I think I write like that… sort of cryptic. A lot of it is metaphor. But what it means to me? I will offer money to whoever can actually figure that out, or even what it’s about.”

The record is heavily, broodingly atmospheric, romantic in a goth-tinged, frosted way. When we point out what sounds like a straight-up nod to Nirvana (the first verse of Offerings repeats “something in the way…. you move me”) – she’s delighted. “Oh my god! Yeah! I mean… yeah, but also no. It’s a weird homage to Paul McCartney and Nirvana at the same time. It’s funny… we don’t mean to, but Warpaint – we do a lot of Nirvana homages and it’s not really intentional. Beside Undertow. Undertow was definitely intentional.” The influence of Undertow – one of the band’s first truly big singles – can certainly be felt beneath the bones of right on!, but in no straightforward sense. This is definitely no Warpaint release.

As Lindberg continues to explain, “I feel that this record has got a little bit of everything. There’s a bit of new wave, sure. But I wouldn’t say that the whole record is goth. I feel like there’s five compartments, five genres of music going in. I didn’t have any prerequisites for how I wanted it to sound.”

We agree that the record’s a shapeshifter – over time, after several listens, it feels a little different... depending on your frame of mind, or perhaps even the weather outside. But whatever it is, “it’s how I’d imagined it”, Lindberg enthuses. “How I had it in my head; it totally came to life how I wanted it to.”

One of the record’s biggest surprises comes in the form of White Devil. Tucked in just before the record wraps up, it’s a truly eerie, prophetic-feeling ballad which suddenly accelerates, exploding in yelps and howls. Assisted in vocals by Lindberg’s friend Kris Byerly, the savage male voice feels a shock – an intrusion, almost – into the world the record’s created so far.

“I wanted a bit more of a masculine feel,” Lindberg explains. “I knew exactly who I was going to call. Obviously there’s tonnnnnes of musicians here to pool from in Los Angeles. Like with my friend Dan [Elkan], too… I was like, I’m not exactly sure what to do guitar-wise on this, do you have any ideas? It was nice for me to wear a different hat. To direct… and still let people bring their own flavours to it.”

Wearing her new directorial hat, Lindberg's built up a team in a very natural, “organic” way, calling upon friends like Warpaint drummer Mozgawa, producer Norm Block and visual artist and regular collaborator Mia for the record’s moody video accompaniments. Her substantial touring band includes Tony Bevilacqua, once of the Distillers, and allows Lindberg to focus solely on vocal duties while on stage. For someone who’s spent all their life behind a bass, though, surely it was difficult to abdicate responsibility? “I mean, no-one’s going to play it like me. It’s just not going to happen like that,” she admits. “It became a different thing, I had to let go of wanting the live show to sound exactly how the record sounds. What’s cool about the record, anyways, is that it is pretty elemental and raw… so it’s not the hardest thing to translate live.” 

Having played two small US shows (“They were more like hangs, really”) in LA and NYC, Lindberg’s first proper venture as jennylee is a short, wintery circuit of the UK – with Glasgow as the opening night. She talks, excitedly, of a much longer tour to come next year, too… but all this has far surpassed her initial intentions. “Originally, I was going to just make a record of demos, and do it all by myself. Then I decided I wanted to step it up a little bit… I was like, 'Nah... you know what? Just go for it. Fully realise your vision. Make an album. Put it out.' I wasn’t going to go on tour, I wasn’t going to play shows… but fuck that. I wanna tour. I wanna do shows. I wanna do it.” If you're gonna do it, do it hard? "Exactly." Right on.