Getting Cozy with Glamour Hotline’s Hayley Jordanna & Thanks for Coming
Review of a Chicago house show at Hundred Acre Wood
by Eileen Marshall
It’s 7 pm on a Sunday, and I don’t know anyone. I see a couple people reading books on couches and hesitate before shyly entering the apartment, wondering if I have the wrong address. I sit in a corner, naturally; but it’s not long before I’m welcomed by Katie Scheuber, the host and organizer of tonight’s show; and the space, dubbed Hundred Acre Wood, turns out to be one of the more comfortable DIY venues I’ve been to. Christmas lights, the off-white kind, are strung along the walls, offering a warm light to the room’s hardwood floors.
The people, too, are warm; everyone’s friends and bandmates are there for them. A donation jar makes the rounds, and it’s gently requested that we contribute what we can to help fund Scheuber’s forthcoming documentary film about homeless women’s vulnerability to violence. It’s heartening.
Fast-forward to the end of Hayley Jordanna’s set: the guy sitting next to me tells her that she reminds him of Twin Peaks — as in the Chicago band — which surprises her, and me, too. To my mind, Jordanna’s performance had more in common with the television series of the same name, as stale as it feels to call something “Lynchian.” It possessed the eeriness of one of that director’s cabaret scenes, their alien heat. It wasn’t what I’d been expecting. I’m not just impressed; I’m awed.
A lot of what drew me to that night’s show was my familiarity with (and fangirlhood for) Jordanna’s three-piece punk band, Glamour Hotline. Since moving to Chicago a year ago, I’ve seen them more than any other local act: playing a fundraiser for a friend’s gender-affirming surgery; a show that followed a panel on women/femmes in music; an opening set for Skating Polly; and so on. Jordanna and bandmates Alex Lukawski and Riley Cavanaugh craft quick and dirty hop-along songs with aggressive, validating choruses (“Fuck the haters…’cause you’re a girl skater” and “I’m not your baby (I’m not yours)” are representative); live, they deliver them with verve.
Solo, Jordanna gives us something else. Glamour Hotline’s riot-grrrl-throwback energy is exquisitely fun, but, while it’s never boring, it does feel rather done-before. Jordanna’s solo material also falls into a tradition, but it’s a longer-standing and, I think, timeless one. Both are driven by anger; but where Glamour Hotline rages against society, Jordanna’s solo fury is personal. She’s a harder, pissed-off Emily Wells, embellishing her blues with a snarl and presenting it through a layer of experimentation. She demonstrates a versatility akin to that of Metric’s Emily Haines, expertly drawing on “Combat Baby” political punk and Knives Don’t Have Your Back confessional modes alike. And whereas a Glamour Hotline show is a party, what Jordanna does approaches performance art.
I’ll tell it like a story.
Jordanna’s playing the second set of the evening. She tells us she’s nervous, she wants to call it off. She gets up there, picks up a guitar, smiles shyly. And from then on she’s supremely self-possessed.
Her first move is to loop a guitar line. Then she stands up, begins to sing. I find myself doubting whether her voice is truly emanating from her body. It’s looping, too, but not through any pedals: “It was real good. It was real nice,” she repeats as she starts to undress. The shorteralls and boots come off and now she’s in her pajamas, now we’re voyeurs to her bedroom burlesque. From a Trader Joe’s bag come a dozen red roses, which Jordanna hands out one by one to the crowd, who sit rapt as she shares her simple, perennial woe.
She’s asked us not to applaud, and it’s not so hard not to, so arresting is the web Jordanna’s spinning. Her Bandcamp bio tells us that the songs there constitute “an artifact of someone [she] used to be,” and they do feel intimate nearly to the point of insularity — but at moments she does let us in, smiling as tears glimmer, intoning, “I know it’s not easy; I’m just not happy.”
Jordanna’s autobiography is evoked in broad statements, and it’s hard to imagine that anyone there isn’t reminded of their own specific struggles with love’s suffering. Looking around the room, it’s occuring to me that the true red of roses looks good against everyone’s skin. We’re all, underneath, made of blood, after all; and Jordanna’s lovehurt blues sounds good to every one of us for that reason, too.
Next up is Thanks for Coming, Rachel Brown’s introspective indie pop project. Brown’s work isn’t any less sorrowfully intimate than Jordanna’s, but their self-presentation is pretty different. Again and again they return, shamelessly, to the obvious pun on the project’s name: “Thanks for coming… I’m called Thanks for Coming.” Well, Rachel, we’re glad you’re here, too.
I’ve seen them play a few times before, always with their band, but tonight they’re returning to their roots with a solo set. Brown put out 37 releases on Bandcamp by themself before releasing their first full-band full-length, Welcome to the Post-Dadcore Revolution, this year on Grandpa Bay Records — and they keep coming out with more. They’re just nineteen and pretty damn cool.
Brown trips up on some of their songs and has to interrupt the set to review their own lyrics on their phone. It’s understandable given that they’re playing older material from an extensive catalog. They ease the awkwardness by telling jokes — apparently they’ve dabbled in stand-up, too — they’re cute, punny dad(core) ones. Jordanna suggests they play songs from the recent split EP with Glamour Hotline (a record I was super excited to catch wind of; these might be my two favorite Chicago bands).
It sounds like a gimmick, but one of Brown’s go-tos is Drake covers, and “Drakechel,” as they call themself before jumping into “Jungle,” works well; the song doesn’t stick out among Brown’s original material; it turns out Drake’s a sadgirl, too. “Jungle,” like most of Brown’s songs, is vulnerable and neurotic: “Feel like we’re one and the same, our relationship changed, that or it never existed … Being indecisive makes me anxious.”
Some other reference points: they’re Waxahatchee without the infusion of alt-country, Adult Mom without the optimism, Frankie Cosmos without the kitsch. Brown’s song structures and lyrics are, respectively, bare-bones and bare-souled, but there’s surprising poetic flair here and there, for example one song’s enigmatic avowal that they “will grow up on the setting sun.” It’s all super sad, which Brown repeatedly warns us of between songs, with a laugh; their whole persona reminds us that pain is a breeding ground for humor. “I’ve got voices in my head telling me to go to bed, that I’d be better off dead. I don’t have the heart to ignore them,” they sing; it’s a heartbreaking joke.
It’s Thanks for Coming’s penultimate Chicago show before Brown returns to New York, where they’re attending college. I’ll miss having them here and anticipate, in a big way, their return.
