Jana Horn - The Window is the Dream (2023)

The Window is the Dream began as a failed poem. I wrote it as I was waking up... the last thing I want in this breath of existence / is not to throw myself into it / as any bird might stop flying / when the window is the dream. I think the original line was "toad breath." My classmates were nice about it, even the teacher.

I was taking a class on esoteric lit, a fiction workshop, a poetry class. And while the poem wasn't quite... a poem... a song did rise from it, like smoke from a fire put-out. The song is called The Dream, which maybe the album is pointing toward. These recurring lines which depict the image of a bird hitting a window, though not out of oblivion, but because the bird knows something we don't.

***What if birds aren't singing, they're screaming? (Aldous Harding)

***What if nightmares were cries from hell? What if nightmares literally took place in hell? Why not? Everything is so strange, even this is possible. (Jorge Luis Borges)

I think of a line from a favorite story of mine, "Car Crash While Hitchhiking," in which a man is observing someone badly hurt, and about to go: And therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth. I don’t mean that we all end up dead, that’s not the great pity. I mean that he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real.

I won't bore you with more quotes... but perhaps my idea with this song, and album, was in part to help keep this broader, ongoing conversation in the air, like a beach ball.

I wrote these songs in the thick of a writing program. I was reading all the time, sometimes five-hundred pages a week or more, there was no music on, for years maybe; my record player broke, the stereo in my car, my laptop’s was on its last speaker and then it started twitching. The feeling of those days was holding on, as though centripetal force alone was keeping everything going. Songs spilled. Days go by / they don't have time. Even the walks I took were circular, around the cemetery and back.

The album was recorded in the breaths I could take away from school, over about a year. Once I had a number of songs, I drove to upstate New York where my friends Sarah and Jared warned me we could make something beautiful. I think I was the first, or one of them, to record in their barn, which is now a bonafide studio. The whole thing was a family affair. Jonathon, one of the guitarists, and I even have the same last name. I like the songs that we play together, how his guitar and my voice sound like they’re having a conversation, or arguing, or trust-falling into one another. There’s more of this, I think, a kind of dialogue throughout, between the voices in the room.