By exploring the binary oppositions of hope and despair, experimental Newcastle-based artist Jayne Dent aka Me Lost Me pushes herself to her emotional limits. On her most recent album, This Material Moment, released in June via Upset the Rhythm, she examines the power of “words as a material”, how we interpret them and their contrasting abilities to physically soothe or sting us in life’s rawest moments.
She was inspired to write her fourth record after she attended a workshop with Julia Holter, where she explored the catharsis of automatic writing techniques and “chance-based writing strategies,” resulting in her most personal and vulnerable offering to date.
We think one of the best ways to get to know an artist is by asking what music inspired them to write in the first place. We caught up with Me Lost Me to ask about her “Five Favourites” – and she picked five albums by an eclectic range of artists who have inspired her songwriting techniques.
Check out her choices below and scroll down to watch the official video for Me Lost Me’s single ‘A Painting of The Wind’ too…
A note from Me Lost Me: I’m an album listener through and through. I love being lost in another world for 30-60 minutes, popping my headphones on, going for a walk and being whisked away. I chose these 5 album specifically because of the lasting impact they’ve had on the music I make as Me Lost Me, from when I was a teenager to just after I’d released my first record, when I was figuring out where I wanted to go with my music.
1. Patrick Wolf – Lycanthropy
Patrick Wolf has a lot to answer for! I grew up with the folk music my parents loved and then suddenly, here was someone drawing on that tradition and screwing with it. Crunchy intense pop electronics with these melodic motifs that felt so rooted in the music I knew and loved, but fresher, weirder and darker.
When I was a teenager I had a ukulele that got accidentally smashed to the point of it being unplayable. Later that year, I won tickets to a gig and meet ’n’ greet in London. A friend and I travelled down from Chesterfield, and I took what was left of this ukulele for him to sign (I didn’t have a record player at the time so I figured there was no point getting a vinyl for the signing). When we spoke, I told him I wanted to write music and remember him saying basically, “well, do it then, start right now”, and on the ukulele he wrote “Jayne, follow the star” (quoting some of his lyrics). I still have it.
I think I needed the permission, perhaps, to just go for it. His first few albums really presented me with the idea that you can play with older forms and ignore genre boundaries. I think that was massive for me then, and clearly stuck with me.
2. Bjork – Homogenic
I struggled to pick a Bjork album, but Homogenic was probably the first one I really fell in love with. In the end, I also had to choose this one because the “emotional landscapes” line in ‘Joga’ is something I’ve held onto as a conceptual ideal of the music I want to make – emotional landscapes – and I still go back to this idea when I write and arrange stuff.
The blend of organic and electronic sounds is so well done, it’s a proper cyborg album, fleshy and robotic in equal parts. Its hard to pick a stand out track, they are all amazing for different reasons and speak to me differently on each listen through. You have songs like ‘Unravel’, so intimate and vast at the same time and the simple visual metaphor in the lyrics is beautiful. Then tracks like ‘Bachlorette’ so full of this angry feral beauty, not as many belt-along tunes as other Bjork albums but they still get me going.
She manages to express this messy, tangled web of emotions and make me feel them along with her. I’ve always thought if I could ever make someone feel that way with my own music, I’d be so happy.
3. Einsturzende neubauten – Ende Neu
There’s a theme emerging here perhaps, artists that capture a multitude of things at once. The reason I love this album isn’t how well knitted together these different elements are, however, the thing I love most about Ende Neu is how the different flavours clash up against each other, it’s delightfully jarring. Its got that classic Einsturzende Neubauten intensity, but it manifests differently in each track. It’s got chant-along tracks like ‘Was Ist Ist’ and the creeping menace of ‘The Garden’, industrial moments, classical moments, and Blixa’s voice – super sweet one moment and pig squealing the next.
I love this album because it’s proof that you can lean into different feelings and flit around. You can be extremely serious and intense and then also be daft, give people whiplash if you like – an album doesn’t need to be a vibe-monolith. ‘The Garden’ is the stand out track for me. It’s the track that made me fall for Einsturzende Neubauten in the first place, it’s so simple but insistent. The lyrics are almost amusingly mundane “you will find me if you want me in the garden / unless its pouring down with rain” but then suddenly expanded out into this abstracted, time-stretching poem.
4. Laurie Anderson – Big Science
When I was studying fine art as an undergrad, I was playing around with musical forms, making sound art and performance art. In a tutorial, I was advised to listen to Laurie Anderson. This album completely blew apart my idea of art and music as separate entities, and rightly so – why would they need to be separate? Why did I ever think they were?
It changed how I framed my work completely and the whole Me Lost Me project came out of this desire to blur art and music – folk and electronic, past and future – and this album was so important for that. It’s a delirious dizzying and surreal experiment in storytelling. It gives snapshots into these strange narratives that are just out of the reach of reality, echoed by the combination of her voice and vocoder, such an uncanny valley feeling. It still gives me goosebumps.
5. Jenny Hval – Blood Bitch
I heard this album after I’d released my first record, Arcana, while I was putting The Good Noise together. It was the first of Jenny Hval’s work I’d come across and it instantly hooked me. It has everything I love: surprising twists, moments of jarring collage, of softness, of raw emotion, moments of addictive, euphoric pop choruses, lyrics I want to investigate, to know intimately. It’s a journey through so many emotional states, it’s the kind of album you want to crawl inside of.
I’ve been a huge fan of her work since and every record is stunning in different ways. I appreciate an approach to album-making that is almost like a collection of related art pieces, not necessarily the same medium, but linked with a through line. It’s like a concept album, I guess, but not in a classic “this has a linear narrative” way. Jenny Hval’s albums instead feel like explorations of an idea and an investigation into something, asking questions that are too messy for a simple answer.
Thanks to Me Lost Me for sharing her favourites with us!
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Photo Credit: Amelia Read
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