Jordan Reynolds is a Bowling Green, KY-born, Atlanta-based singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, whose career started in earnest when she was 19 and playing keys in psych rock outfit Buffalo Rodeo. “We bought an Econoline van that didn’t even have seats in it for like $1,500. We fixed it up, and I learned how to be in a band,” she says. “I learned how to communicate with sound guys, how to fix a pedal board on the fly, how to be the only girl on a tour with 10 dudes. It was a super formative time for me. When rubber hit the road, I was like ‘oh, this is actually what I really want to be doing.’”
Since her time in Buffalo Rodeo, Reynolds has built a career as an in-demand side musician playing keys and guitar and providing backing vocals for Neighbor Lady, Susto, Faye Webster and She Returns From War, while being the creative mastermind behind the recording project Rose Hotel.
Reynolds collaborated with longtime friend Micheal Ruth to produce her debut Rose Hotel EP, 2017’s Always a Good Reason, which helped her build a following in small-town music scenes around the Southeast. Her full-length debut, 2019’s I Will Only Come When It’s a Yes received praise from Vice, as “a wonderfully collaborative LP,” where “Reynolds’ songwriting shines as she navigates the gray areas in love and life” and featured a cultivated group of DIY musicians in her then-newly adopted home base of East Atlanta.
Since then, Reynolds has released a double cassingle 2020’s “Drive Alone”/”Constant” and 2021’s The House That We Knew EP through Nashville-based Cold Lunch Recordings.
While her full-length debut, presented a coming-of-age story, the Atlanta-based artist’s highly-anticipated sophomore album, the 10-song A Pawn Surrender approaches adulthood with a genre-spanning yet cohesive approach that pulls from an expansive palette of psychedelic shimmer and jangle and Southern folk that was inspired and informed by a chess metaphor. “I was playing a lot of chess when I wrote this album, so I started to think about these songs as if they were all different pieces on the board representing varying aspects of my songwriting, personality, and experience,” Reynolds explains. “Each piece has its own specific purpose and its own strength to utilize, but you can’t play the game with only your queen or your knights, or whatever. That became such a comforting idea and ethos to operate within – not just accepting variety but finding its inherent value. I went into the studio without any fear of being all over the board. I wanted to be limitless in letting my influences shine through the music in different ways.”
The studio backing band for the A Pawn Surrenders sessions features a personally hand-picked group of players that Reynolds knows from DIY scenes across the Southeast and includes Rich Ruth’s and S.G. Goodman‘s Micheal Ruth (synth), Neighbor Lady’s, Night Palace‘s, and CDSM‘s Jack Blauvelt (lead guitar, drums), Margo Price‘s, Caitlin Rose‘s, and Orville Peck‘s Luke Schneider (pedal steel), Neighbor Lady’s Payton Collier (bass, drums), RumorsATL‘s and Nomenclature‘s Denny Hanson (bass, piano) and a list of others.
Reynolds co-produced the album with Standard Electric Recorders engineer Damon Moon and Mirror Mirror Recordings engineer Graham Tavel. She enlisted acclaimed Athens, GA-based producer Drew Vandenberg for additional production and mixing. “I brought Damon and Graham together to form one unified brain with me,” she explains. “Damon’s incredibly curated studio space has a certain crispness that I was after. He knows how to get that clean, beautiful, organic sound. On the other end of the spectrum, Graham comes from a background in Punk and DIY, and brings a really unique analog approach. Together, I think we found a sweet spot between HiFi and LoFi.”
Thematically, the album reportedly sees the Bowling Green, KY-born, Atlanta-based artist exploring relationships, feminine rage, lust, temptation, blissful ignorance, apathy, delusions, illusions and more.
A Pawn Surrender‘s latest single “Fruit Tree” is a lush and seamless synthesis of 60s psych pop and psych folk and shoegaze, featuring an arrangement of shimmering acoustic guitar and electric guitar, fluttering flute, atmospheric synths and thunderstorm samples. While seemingly evoking getting caught in a rain storm on a narrow stretch of two-lane blacktop surrounded by verdant greenery, the song is anchored by Reynold’s sultry, siren-like delivery beckoning the listener to come, come, come . . .
“I wrote ‘Fruit Tree’ towards the end of the album writing process — a time where I was thinking very much about what I wanted from music and my ‘career’ and if that dream was even possible anymore,” Reynolds explains. “I wanted to personify the temptation of success in music as something sensual and lusted over, which brought up the image of the forbidden fruit. The lyrics are written from the perspective of the Fruit Tree, but with the tantalizing voice of an alluring woman. Sort of a ‘Be Careful What You Wish For’ tune.”
Directed by Hannah Welever and her production company Good Trouble Films, the accompanying video is a gorgeously shot, Lynchian and eerily Southern Gothic tale of lust, longing, temptation and madness
A Pawn Surrender is slated for a June 7, 2024 release through Strolling Bones Records.
