Jenn Champion Looks Back

“I think, in the context of a record, sometimes it’s such a safe place to be sad, you can really experience this almost pleasure in sadness,” Jenn Champion says over Zoom, “I don’t know what it is about sad music that I can find some pleasure in it, there’s just something so appealing to listen to it.”

Sad is an ethereal static idea that has clung to band names throughout Champion’s career, projects like Seattle indie rock band Carissa’s Wierd and the bedroom-pop leaning S. Sad and its associated charges; emotional, moody, dark, somber. Sad as the flat idea of a position opposite to joy. But what is sadness if not a spectrum of feelings and emotional states that shifts in our hearts as the years mark our hearts and bodies on this earth? Champion, an ardent practitioner of this relative theory of emotional states, is here with a new record, The Last Night Of Sadness, to shepherd us through a journey of what bounty sadness has to offer.

Funded entirely through a Kickstarter campaign, The Last Night Of Sadness builds on the foundation of synth-forward electronic pop music that Champion has been adding to over the course of a career that has shifted and found new forms with the passing years. From her debut album as Jenn Champion, Single Rider (released via Sub Pop sister label Hardly Art in 2018), she has proved herself adept at the sublime alchemy of sadness and ecstatic release, electronic music danceable for eager feet wrapped with tender words that bleed hearts dry. All of this is present still in The Last Night of Sadness, layered synths and haunting vocals crafting exquisite rhythms behind stories of loss and trauma and the well-earned victories found at the heart of survival.

It’s a creative vision with a deliberate arc, a cycle of somber reflection, loss and grief and acceptance that nonetheless finds time to hold delicate space for perseverance and what joy there is to be found in finding all the ways that life has yet to show you. The album as a journey through the stages of processing all things, feeling what feelings may haunt us. This too is deliberate; “The sequence is very intentional,” Champion says of the album as a complete vision, “the whole record being a journey where you get to know me a little bit and my experience in the world, the journey of do I want to live, and then my friends are dying and then this is precious, you know?”

Before the release of 2018’s Single Rider, Champion’s work had been largely guitar-focused, an instrument with which she was intimately familiar with. A glance at her Instagram feed finds her shredding classic guitar lines with the casual demeanor of a master craftsperson confident in the strength of her tools. But moving into synths with recent endeavors has afforded an opportunity for Champion to challenge herself, and to grow with uncertain outcomes. “I just know guitar so well, that it can be hard for me to explore,” she says, “I think my innovation comes from making mistakes, or trying to figure something out, and I think that’s when I can stumble on something cool.” Not always knowing where the instrument is taking her provides more room for freedom, “I was able to explore my voice more,” she says.

Funded entirely through fan support on Kickstarter, the record is freed from the whims of a mercurial music industry. “I think we’re seeing more and more artists kind of trying to reclaim art,” Champion says, “because I think the internet and streaming and all that is kind of, how do we commodify anything we do, you know? And I think trying to peddle it back a little bit and be like, can I just make art and people buy the art?” In being fan-funded, she is able to own and control her work, and to directly feel the trust placed in her work by so many. “It was just extraordinary to feel like there were a bunch of people that were like, yeah we really want to hear this next thing that you’re doing,” she adds.

This direct-to-fan connection is a road that artists are increasingly looking to tread. Artists like Laura Jane Grace have taken to platforms like Patreon to connect directly with fans and offer subscriptions to deliver exclusive content in exchange for a monthly fee, delivering content right to fans digital doorsteps and building community at a more grassroots level. Musicians like Neko Case have taken to Substack and Discord is increasingly becoming a viable opportunity for fans and artists to create a space together. Bandcamp emerged in the midst of the pandemic with Bandcamp Fridays, a day where 100% of proceeds go directly to artists’ pockets. And, while the future of Bandamp is uncertain at the moment, the idea remains the same across channels and platforms: fans connecting right to the artists they love to support that next thing they’re doing.

The Last Night of Sadness is Champion’s; a personal exploration of trauma, grief and loss, told through bright and dreamy synth layers and piano ballads. It’s a cathartic record in many ways, drawing forth from deep emotional wells but also leaning into its own triumph of learning to trust yourself and the skills you have gained over time as the years add new numbers to our ages. “I think that it gave me confidence as a producer, and I think taking so much stuff I had learned over the years as a music person and tech person and engineer who is essentially self taught, basically. I was almost able to make a truer record, because I had the skills to do what I wanted to do. If I was like, I do want to make this kind of dancey, eerie, weird record, I know what to do,” Champion says.

The heaviest hurdle in the path of progress is reflection, the ability and desire to look back at what has been, all the moments that are left in the wake of our lives that cannot be fixed or changed. In making a record that moves through so many stages of grief and loss, Jenn Champion is finding compassion for the years of her youth. “I think getting older, it’s a little bit easier to have compassion for myself when I was younger, and just be like, God, she was doing her best,” she notes. In an era of increasingly commodified emotions, influencers and media that peddle easy narratives to reassure us that hardships heal with time and easy resolutions. Champion wants to open the door to difficult conversations without closing it. “I wanted to really express the thought of thinking about death and dying and losing friends and whatever,” she adds, “I always feel like [with] the stages of grief or whatever there’s always like a resolution, there’s always this closure in there and I just don’t think that fits for me, this will always be a person I miss forever, this will always be absent. I think my mom once said, it’s the presence of an absence when somebody dies.”

This is not to say that there isn’t life in all the talk of death, there is humor in the bones of all that she has built here. “The tragedy that you face or that life slams into you, sometimes it’s just so funny,” Champion says. “I think, sometimes, you can only laugh at it. I think it can be sad and funny. I can look back to someone just handing you some pills and being like, yep, versus now being like, can I take this vitamin without food?” Her songwriting is deep and heartfelt and raw, a voice of tender vulnerability and impressive strength entwined as one. That she is able to place it under such rhythms of movement and calming rivers of beautiful synth waves is testament to all that is possible when the richness of all that we are capable of is nurtured and cared for. With fans showing their ready support through Kickstarter, there’s a trust in what she has become known for over the many years and permutations, as Champion says, “I felt like if you’re a fan of me, you probably know what you’re getting into.”

Knowing the audience is there and eager to join her on impassioned dancefloors, and trusting herself sonically and emotionally, led to The Last Night Of Sadness. An album looking back with wisdom earned with time to grant grace and care to the memories of past hardships that left deep footprints on the soul. “I think that’s what sometimes I think that’s why Carissa’s Wierd can hold such a special place for people, including me, is that it was the most genuine,” Champion says. “I didn’t know how to not be genuine in music.”

Niko Stratis is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in outlets like SPIN, Bitch, Autostraddle, Catapult and more. Her work primarily focuses on culture, the 1990s, queer/trans topics and as often as possible where all those ideas intersect. Niko lives in downtown Toronto with her fiancé and their dog and 2 cats. She is a cancer.