Music
Press
".....a singer and lyricist whose ethereal but muscley voice combines the best features of Enya, Sinead O'Connor, and Bjork—fantastic!" - Dance Insider
"Seductive……Slinks under your skin!" - New York Times
"Versatile, seductive, distinctive, gutsy….. I fell in love with her voice!" - Free-Reed Review
"Jana creates a new genre, reminiscent of Madonna!" - WPKN
"Jana's voice is delicate and soothing, with muscle!" - Inside World Music
JANA LOSEY RELEASES NEW CD
Jana Losey was part of the local scene a decade, before leaving to join the opera. Squonk Opera, that is, the Pittsburgh-based performance group that needed a lead singer.
But after spending five years with Squonk Opera, then dropping out for a couple of years to move to San Diego and attend massage school, she once again started pursuing music two years ago. Now she's finished her debut solo CD, “Bittersweet,” and will be performing at the Rongovian Embassy tonight.
Losey worked with collaborator Melanie Peters, whom she met out in San Diego. “We started out to make the CD and wanted it to be really raw, just a great guitar track and a great vocal,” says Losey, who currently lives in Corning, across the border from her native Lawrenceville, Pa. “But we started writing these songs and realized that they were great pop songs and that we needed to do something with them. Melanie is friends with Dave Uosikkinen from the Hooters — he produced a record with her old band — so she called him to lay down a couple of tracks.
“And it snowballed from there — we felt like we had to round it out, so everything got way more produced from that point. We recorded all the basic tracks in San diego and and did the background tracks at Electric Wilburland in Newfield. Both experiences were great.”
Losey, who played with Park Doing's band the Trailer Parks while attending Ithaca College 1992-1995, plans to move back to Ithaca in the near future.
Losey says she writes all the time. “ I have a spiritual teacher who says, ‘If you get sensitive to it, you can pick up on what's going on. You get these little impressions and it seems like a story that comes out of nowhere, but really it's somebody's story just floating around' I feel like that about a lot of the songs, they're a mix of that and something that happened to me or somebody else. So I kind of just let it go, and see what comes, and just tweak the lyrics to fit the songs. I just try to follow the music to see where it leads me. I'm usually so much happier with the outcome when I do that rather than try to conceive of it and make it something. This album really represents that — these songs really happened to me — and Mel feels that way, too.”
There's a $2 cover for tonight's 9 p.m. show. To learn more visit www.janalosey.com. - Ithaca Journal, Ithaca NY
Music helps Tiers native find way home.
Horseheads grad to release new CD on Friday.
April 9, 2006
The music has always been there in Jana Losey's head. Right now seems like the perfect time to let it out again.
Losey, a Lawrence-ville native and 1992 Horseheads High School graduate, will sing songs from her upcoming CD, “Bittersweet,” Friday at the Lakeview Lodge in Lawrence-ville. The concert will be one of her first since she gave up music as a career following her run in a Broadway show five years ago.
The show was “Bigsmorgasbordwunderwerk,”a production of the Pittsburgh-based musical performance-art group Squonk Opera. As a student at Ithaca College, Losey saw a Squonk Opera performance and was intrigued. When she learned they were performing without a singer, she reached out to the group. Eventually, she moved to Pittsburgh and joined them.
She was with Squonk Opera when it made its Broadway debut in 2000 at the Helen Hayes Theatre. After the show closed, she stayed on in New York, hoping to start a singing career.
Things didn't go as planned.
“I pretty much gave up,” she said. “I was really burnt out. I swore off music for a while. I had a brief stint in New York trying to get a manager and going to casting calls, but I couldn't really handle it. I thought ‘I was in a show like that and have huge credits' and you don't really feel like you should have to pay your dues all over again.”
She went West, to San Diego, and started on an entirely different path. She trained as a massage therapist and started her own practice.
She kept busy with her studies and developing the business. She enjoyed the work. Music wasn't on her mind until she settled into a regular routine. Then it started creeping back in.
“I think I had sort of an epiphany,” she said. “I was relaxed in my business and was on vacation for a week. We were driving, and I just said out loud to whoever it was I was traveling with, ‘I think I'm going to start playing music again.' I wrote a couple of songs on that trip, messed around with them, but kept it to myself.”
The urge to write and sing again grew inside her. She put together a CD of new music with the help of a musician she met in her Pittsburgh days, but she sat on it. The time was coming, but wasn't quite right.
She recently moved back to the area and settled in Corning, and now she's ready. She and her songwriting partner, Melanie Peters, wrote and recorded the songs on “Bittersweet.” She described the sound - Losey's singing and Peters' lone guitar — as “aggressive acoustic.” It's evolved from that, now that she's put together a backing band.
Along with Losey singing and playing keyboards and Peters on guitar are a group of Ithaca-area musicians: drummer Charlie Shew, guitarist Mike Parker and bassist Doug Robinson. Each plays more than one instrument, Losey said, which makes them a pretty flexible group. Putting the band together has been, “strangely easy.”
“Ithaca is a hotbed of talented people, as I knew from when I was there,” she said. “They're pros, and they're really quick studies, and I'm really lucky to be playing with them. They're a lot better than me.”
In addition to the Lawrenceville show Friday, the band has booked performances at 9 p.m. April 27 at Trumansburg's Rongovian Embassy and 8 p.m. May 3 at Bring the Blues in Elmira. They'll celebrate the release of “Bittersweet” April 21 at Quaker Steak and Lube in State College.
Everything seems to be falling into place in all the ways it wasn't in New York City. That, Losey said, is an indication she's doing the right thing.
“It's been a fantastic homecoming for me,” she said. “Everything's been really easy. You have to trudge uphill a lot of times in this business, but it's just been really great. I feel really great about this move.”
•
John P. Cleary is a staff writer for the Star-Gazette. Neighbors runs daily on this page. - Star-Gazette news, NY
MySpace the music place
Bands, locally and nationally, find Web site great way to showcase their music.
By STEPHEN HAGENBUCH
Special to the Star-Gazette
March 26, 2006
myspace.com
If you go to Corning musician Jana Losey's MySpace Web page, here is part of what you'll see. Her site is typical of others: photograph, bio, ways to contact her, playlist and player for the songs, upcoming shows, blogs, listing of friends, photo gallery and more. Web site: www.myspace.com/janalosey.
Scheduling out-of-town bands to play at The Haunt, an Ithaca music club, used to be tedious. The booking manager would search for a band's past performances, find out if they had a Web site, even call other venues to see how many people the band brought in.
Now, the entire process can be done with just a few clicks on the social-networking Web site MySpace.com. Bands across the country, including hundreds in the Twin Tiers, have signed up for the free site.
"It has DJ's, artists, it's amazing," said Haunt Booking Manager Michael Miller. "In my opinion, MySpace is to networking what Hotmail was to e-mail."
Miller said he only discovered MySpace a few months ago, but it's already become ubiquitous. "I check e-mail and I check MySpace at the same time," he said. "I use it that much now."
MySpace gets as many as 180,000 new members a day and it now has more than 54 million registered users. There are more than 300 bands on MySpace from The Star-Gazette's readership area in the Twin Tiers, according to a search on the Web site.
Musician Jana Losey, of Corning, has had a MySpace Web page for more than six months.
"It's been the best networking thing I have ever had experience with," she said. "There are so many ways you can search somebody out (by radius, influence, sounds like so and so, ). It's just great, so straightforward. There is a picture, the music comes up, you don't have to navigate anyone's Web site. They have everything all on one page."
Losey is a Lawrenceville native who was a musician in San Diego before moving back to the area. She was a member of a critically acclaimed five-person musical theater troupe, Squonk, that performed in New York City as well as locally in the Ithaca area and Geneva. Losey plays piano, sax and flute, and with a band backing her up plays mostly songs she's composed.
Though Losey has not landed a gig through her MySpace site, she said she is corresponding to a couple musicians in New York City, talking about local places to play, other musicians, etc.
"It's nice to have other people do reviews of your music (they hear on your MySpace site.) Because (MySpace) is musically based, it's not creepy in any way. It's about music."
MySpace nights at clubs
MySpace's popularity has prompted many venues, including The Haunt, to host MySpace nights, featuring popular local artists as well as new ones that booking managers may have discovered on the site.
The Haunt's Miller said MySpace is especially useful for bands that are on the road. Out-of-town bands can use MySpace to find local bands who can draw a crowd at a venue, and then play after them.
"When you're a band traveling out of town, people don't know who you are and they won't come out unless a strong local band is playing," Miller said. "So having a strong local band open the show will guarantee the show there."
Star-Gazette Twin Tiers Life editor Bob Jamieson contributed to this story. - Star Gazette-NY
<a href="http://http://www.janalosey.com/JUSTOUT.html" target="_blank"><h2>JUST OUT MAGAZINE, Portland, OR. Feb 2007</a> - Just Out Magazine
Discography
**"BLOCKS"** Nationaly distributed Sophmore album scheduled for release April Fools Day 2008 - no joke! Major PR and radio campaign beginning January 2008.
**"BITTERSWEEET II" ** Re-released sold-out debut CD with 4 Live Tracks. Available on CDBaby, and iTunes.
Radio Airplay:
Heavy regular rotation in Upstae NY and Central/Northern PA, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle.
ADULT CONTEMPORARY
**"BITTERSWEET"** out-of-print Debut CD sold over 2000 copies across the US.
**"Bittersweet", first single released off of "Bittersweet" CD August 2006
** "Messy Little Happiness"**, second single, college market.
**"London Holiday", b-side to first single, also receiving airplay on AC Stations
**"Blink of an Eye" "(S)He Loves Me", both spinning on internet radio (www.radioioACOUSTIC.com)
Photos
Bio
Voted a "Suggested Artist" By VH-1 Song of the Year Awards!
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“I want people to have an ‘altered time’ kind of experience that happens in the theater or a really good movie — the kind where you can forget about what’s going on with you and travel like you’re dreaming.”
For singer/songwriter Jana Losey and her and co-writer/producer Melanie Peters, it’s not just the live performances that have felt dreamlike in recent days. After touring cross-country and moving back to her hometown of Lawrenceville, PA (population 600), Jana and Melanie recorded this labor of love mostly in the house where Jana grew up — the same house that will soon be torn down to accommodate the new highway currently going up in their backyard!
Naturally, that experience played a part in shaping the lyrical themes new songs such as “The Song You Heard.” “Some people have children, and that makes them feel a slice of immortality,” explains Losey. “I have my music to leave behind – my songs are my children, my slice of immortality.”
So how does a Pennsylvania farm girl develop such keen artistic determination? Where did the vision and ambition begin to take root? If every musical path can be traced back to its first few baby steps, you could follow Jana’s back to when she was three.
“Everywhere I went I carried around a small suitcase record player, a jump rope, and a couple 45s. When I found a wiling audience, I would ‘plug’ the jump rope ‘into’ the record player and sing ‘Sugar Sugar’ by The Archies”
When she was growing up, Losey’s exposure to pop culture was limited a bit by the size of her hometown. “Today, everybody from your dentist to your mom is in a band of some sort,” Losey says. “I think it’s great that kids start bands so young now. They have so much more access to music and the world. I was pretty sheltered, and there was some good to that. But I do wish I had started things earlier.”
In her small town, however, learned how to play guitar, piano, flute and tenor saxophone. In college, she studied voice, and minored in photography and dance.
Utilizing those acquired talents to their fullest, Jana spent five years with wacky performance art/theater troupe Squonk Opera. Staging an avante-garde Broadway production, the well-rounded Losey developed a unique talent for delivering the kind of ‘altered time’ experience she hopes her performances will inspire.
“I think my theater experience taught me to think of the show from the audience’s perspective. I think I’m also more open to combinations of music and visuals that might create things people haven’t seen or heard before.”
Those unexpected combinations were first explored on her 2006 debut Bittersweet and subsequent tour. That record, the result of a serendipitous collaboration with partner Melanie Peters, earned a good deal of radio airplay in the northeast, which translated into a devoted following of fans.
“When Melanie and I started to explore writing together, the songs got good really fast,” Losey reflects. “I wanted to share them. I left New York burned out, but with this project, I felt rejuvenated. So I slowly crept back into the business.”
The success of the Bittersweet album encouraged her to begin thinking about how to construct a long-term, sustainable career in music. As a result, she began to take a big-picture view of her life in general and how she could sow the seeds for a long career, and eventually create a permaculture community. That direction inspired her to make changes that affect many aspects of her life on the road.
“My commitment to Permaculture right now is mostly a commitment to considering the environment in everything I do. From office supplies and CD production to food choices, gasoline and motel rooms, I try to make the least amount of impact I can.” Losey’s goal is to use her music, Web site, and touring performances to support and spread the word about environmental sustainability.
In the past year, organic evolution has been evident in Losey’s songwriting process as well. Whereas, Bittersweet was an experiment in writing pop songs that originally were intended to be sold to other artists, Losey describes her new record Blocks as a project that was conceived and structured as an album from the beginning. During the development of Blocks, Losey’s primary goal was to focus on her storytelling.
“I want to not force-feed people an oversimplified lyric, and at the same time, not be so esoteric that my intention is not clear. I always strive to be a better songwriter and I hope the albums played back to back will illustrate that.”
So what’s next for this modern Renaissance woman? “I’m working really hard to make a fan base that is lasting, not following trends,” says Losey. “People who will like the artistic changes I will no doubt go through. We plan to be bi-coastal traveling back and forth between upstate New York and California.”
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