Liz Janes

Singer and songwriter Liz Janes stumbled into a professional music path largely without design, an unexpected turn given the emotional depth and assuredness that mark her recordings. She spent her childhood in a Washington D.C. suburb, absorbing a constant stream of AM radio before encountering classic blues, jazz, and gospel. As a youngster she studied piano and appeared in school recitals, occasionally visiting jazz venues in Philadelphia, yet a pronounced bout of stage fright struck during her early teens and cooled her enthusiasm for performing, even as she kept composing privately. Relocating to Olympia, Washington for college placed her among experimental noise musicians, prompting a switch in focus from philosophy to art and a revived commitment to music. Once she had gathered a sufficient body of material, Janes captured the songs casually at home on a four-track cassette recorder. Though she had no plans to share the results, she passed a copy to then-boyfriend Mike Kaufmann, who forwarded it to his acquaintance Sufjan Stevens. Impressed by the material, Stevens invited Janes to revisit the pieces over several days at his residence, where he augmented the minimalist solo takes with full-band arrangements; the finished recordings appeared in 2002 on Stevens’ Asthmatic Kitty imprint under the title Done Gone Fire. Reviewers singled out her forceful, lucid singing, leading to further sessions and tours alongside Stevens, Black Heart Procession, Soul-Junk, and Kaufmann’s Future Rapper. Her follow-up album, Poison & Snakes, arrived in 2004, and the next year she joined the ensemble Create(!) for an unconventional collection of traditional folk numbers. By then married to Kaufmann, Janes paused her public work to focus on raising children, yet she kept writing amid domestic responsibilities. In 2010 she carved out studio time to complete the album Say Goodbye.