Jenny Reynolds took the plunge and moved from Boston to Austin in 2003 after she attended the Kerrville Folk Festival and was named a New Folk Finalist. The local encouragement paid off, and
tonight at the Cactus Café the singer-songwriter celebrates the release of Next to You, her first album since she arrived here.
“I was being influenced by the music here that wasn’t available in Boston,” she explains of her move. “I’d heard Toni Price and the Resentments and I knew Jerry Jeff Walker and Guy Clark, but I didn’t know Matt the Electrician, James McMurtry, or Shelly King. Those people are so much more available here and influenced me more then the Northeast folk sound. So I wasn’t done listening when I got here. I needed to learn some things and I took the time to do that.”
One of the first places the dark-haired Red Sox fan visited was South Austin Music. “I just went to what I thought was the coolest music store in town and started to make friends.” Those connections led to her meeting folks like guitarist David Hamburger, another Bostonian, who backed her for a while, and Ruthie Foster. Eventually she met Scrappy Jud Newcomb, who co-produced Next to You.
“I feel blessed to able to work with such talented people,” she confesses. “There’s a feeling that the business is more organic here. The people here feel that the song is more important than the person singing it.” Newcomb brought in Bump Band-mate Ian McLagan to play on the disc, which also features Foster and fiddler Warren Hood.
Asked about the bowling shoes she used as the cover for Next to You, Reynolds explains she’s not much of a bowler but was impressed by the image.
“The original idea was to find a photo of a bus stop because you never know who you’ll find next to you there. I liked the ambiguity of it. But I also like the bowling shoes image because it implies that there’s always a pair, which I thought invited a comparison to being in a relationship. But there’s also a shoe missing, a spot where you could be. It was kind of a happy accident, really.”
Also catch Reynolds Thursday, March 13, 3pm at Opal Divine’s Penn Field location for her SXSW day show.
This article appears in February 22 • 2008.