Folkadelphia Session: Jenny Owen Youngs

Welcome to this year’s final edition of the Folkadelphia Sessions! In 2013, we brought you nearly 60 in-studio sessions, all recorded in and around Philadelphia, many at WXPN’s Performance Studio. We’ve heard from artists as diverse as Devotchka, Tim Kasher, Chris Forsyth, and Holly Williams (to name a few) – many of these sessions are collected in our new Folkadelphia Sessions Volume One compilation, now available for free download. In 2014, you can look forward to hearing sessions from Tift Merritt, CocoRosie, Quilt, Denison Witmer, Basia Bulat, and many others.

To close the book on ol’ thirteen, we couldn’t be more pleased to present our session with Brooklyn-based songwriter Jenny Owen Youngs. I remember delving into her Transmitter Failure album in 2009 and being charmed and intrigued by her writing and singing, but it was with her third and most recent full-length An Unwavering Band of Light that she really blew me away. During our studio session, she truly transformed me into a lifelong fan. Simply stated, Youngs is one of the kindest, gracious, and most generous performers we’ve had the pleasure of welcoming to track a few songs. Everyone working in the studio left feeling better than they had when they walked in. We talked, we laughed, we were drawn to JOY’s playing. No one else has ever arrived and nailed a Disney movie song (and a most badass version if I do say so myself). Her own lyrics are marked by intimacy, openness, and a confessional quality to them; they are easy to relate to in their humor, pain, embarrassment, victory, and awkwardness. It’s no wonder that the songwriter has cultivated a dedicated and devoted fan base.

We recorded our session with Jenny Owen Youngs on September 27th, 2013 before her concert at the Boot & Saddle.