Top Gun

Jen Trynin's aim is true

by Brett Milano

The beauty of a great pop song is that it channels meaningful emotion into a simple form. Of course, you need a certain sleight-of-hand to turn complex experience into a catchy chorus hook; the writer has to take risks with the subject matter and be creative about turning the hooks. The formula is simple; pulling it off is the hard part.

That's why you have to admire Jen Trynin: she makes it look easy. For its songwriting alone, her Gun Shy Trigger Happy (due this Tuesday from Warner Bros.) would be an obvious contender for the year's best local release. Every track on it sports a beautifully turned hook and says something perceptive about the richness and screwed-up-ness of grown-up relationships. But the album also shows Trynin finding her own musical voice. In the past she's worked within formats, whether it was the guitar-driven alternative pop of her first album, Cockamamie, or the moody, Joni Mitchell-ish approach of her earlier demo tapes. This time she finds something a little less definable, a little more eclectic, and a lot more hers.

True to its title, Gun Shy Trigger Happy is an album with a split personality: half the tracks are slow and moody, the others are closer to the revved-up exuberance of Cockamamie. The big difference is that she doesn't aim for a live-band sound this time. Her trio were in transition when sessions began: longtime drummer Chris Foley remains aboard, but Gravel Pit/Jules Verdone bandmember Ed Valauskas -- since replaced by ex-Poundcaker Josh Lattanzi -- sits in on bass. And for the most part the stage arrangements got thrown out, the songs being reworked in the studio. Departing from his usual live-sounding approach, producer Mike Denneen took a more active hand in the arrangements, adding keyboard parts that sound like keyboard parts. Trynin throws more left curves into her songs, exploring the abstract possibilities of Denneen's keyboard loops, her own guitar textures, and her multilayered vocals (the voices are all hers, even the slowed-down, very male-sounding ones on "Around It"). And she's developed the vocal confidence to handle the old-fashioned torch ballad "I Don't Need You" and the sultry/obsessive finale, "Rang You & Ran."

"I act like I've got some master plan, but the truth is that I just write songs and make the rest up later," she explains over drinks at the Middle East in Cambridge. "On the first album, we faked it -- we took people I'd played together with at different times and made them sound like a band. I don't know if it sounded like alternative rock, but it sounded like something a lot of people liked at the time. And maybe I OD'd on that sound. Then I played acoustic for a while and got sick of that, too. Now I'm liking a more relaxed, groove-oriented thing."

And what of the usual pressure attached to sophomore albums, the conventional wisdom that says you have 20 years to write your first album and six months for the second? "That one doesn't bother me, because I'd been making all the tapes on my own before Cockamamie. So it didn't feel like a first album -- it took two years, just like this one. Really, I'm neurotic as hell and a lot of things bother me. But that doesn't."

Gun Shy inhabits a gray area between alternative and "adult" rock -- an independence that's creative but may confuse radio programmers. Then again, one can never tell what's going to sell. Trynin reports that Warners suggested she change the title because Wal-Mart might not carry an album that mentions guns. The irony there boggles the mind. "Right, that question of how the album is going to do," she ponders, putting mock-weighty emphasis on that last phrase. "The truth is that I have no idea. If people appreciate it, that means I'm doing my job. And that the songs are about something people can relate to, instead of me, myself, and I, and how fuckin' deep I am."

Still, she's aware that Warners plans to work the album heavily, that Entertainment Weekly is running a color photo spread, that Rolling Stone has a favorable review on tap. Does she see rock stardom on the horizon? "No, because I'm not that foolish. This time I'm getting into the discipline of working on music every day, trying to run every day, and working on my voice. And trying to respect and appreciate what I'm able to do."

Besides, Trynin saw her share of music-biz strangeness last time around. Three years ago, she was the object of a major-label bidding war, in what one might call her "Irving Azoff at T.T. the Bear's Place" period -- yes, the Giant Records owner and Eagles manager was among the bigshots who crammed into local clubs to check her out. A lot of local musicians envied her at the time. But Trynin also had to hit the road with big money and expectations riding on her, only to come back home with a few good reviews, a bit of airplay, and less-than-phenomenal sales of Cockamamie, which she'd previously released on her own Squint label.

"You want to know what it felt like?" she asks, revving into high gear. "Put it this way: music in and of itself is never weird, but people are weird. And people have this way of clustering around something, say music, and everybody's weirdness gets flung against one another. People do art, and other people bet something on that art -- some people bet money, but most of them bet their egos on it. Some people really need to love something; others really need to hate it. And whoever gets caught in the middle gets put on that cross."

In other words, things got a little strange. "Well, right. Before it all happened, my life had been exactly the same for six years, and I wanted something to happen -- it could have been assassination, it could have been anything. And when it [the bidding war] started, I knew it was stupid, but nobody around me understood that I knew how stupid it was. And my friends and family started looking at me like there was this other Jen, this other head coming out of my shoulders. Something was happening that I couldn't live up to, and I was waiting for it to be over. And it was over fast, and now it feels like it happened to somebody else."

That sense of dislocation fueled a lot of her songwriting, but give her credit for not writing any "band on the road" type songs (the only song that sounds like one, "Writing Notes," turns out to be four years old). Instead she wound up getting drawn to other scary thoughts -- cosmetic surgery, for instance. The album's most daring track, "Under the Knife," is only the second rock song I've heard on that subject, the other being Paul Westerberg's "Mannequin Shop." But whereas that one settles for smug humor, Trynin's song is creepy, with a fittingly doctored and haunting lead vocal. The song resolves with a surprising Rolling Stones-ish guitar workout, but those ghostly voices are still dancing around it.

"I loved doing that song," she grins when I mention that I found it unsettling. "I think it was Seattle when I wrote that -- the band was out somewhere and I couldn't leave the hotel room because I had to do some interviews. For some reason I started thinking about women in rock, and the importance put on looks, and that's what came out. Why don't you have somebody make you perfect, and while they're at it, why don't they cut into your innards so you can't have babies and ruin your perfect body. So fuck it, let's have a party. And the part at the end is the party you go to when you're perfect."

The single, "Get Away (February)," sounds deceptively like a pretty pop song -- which it is, but it also confirms her ability to write a "fuck you" song that goes down sweetly. It's addressed to a lover who, like February in Boston, just won't go away. "There's nothing more embarrassing than being the object of that big goodbye scene, where somebody's leaving you but they won't go ahead and leave. And you know what February's like, it's the ultimate `fuck with you' month -- like it's supposed to be short and it's supposed to be over, but it never is. And you're thinking, `Cool, I made it through January, I've only thrown up twice from being drunk, and I'm still with my significant other.' And then winter never ends."

She points out that all these personal shake-ups didn't necessarily happen to her. "My own life is actually stable and boring. But I had a lot of time to think. And that's what I like about life, all the weird parts -- vibes and color and all that philosophical stuff."

One small but notable change is that the new album is credited to Jen Trynin, not Jennifer Trynin. "I hate the name Jennifer. The only reason I ever used it was that it sounded better when I introduced myself over the phone. I wanted to make everything easier this time, and I'll start by using my own name."

She's also trying her damnedest to let go of the smart-ass persona that got attached to her last time around. "Everybody was expecting me to be this wise-ass -- which I am, but not 24 hours a day. I take life pretty seriously, and I guess I wasn't acknowledging that. It's not like, `Whatever man, I don't care how I sound.' Because fuck it, I do care."