Great vocals and solid production make for a debut album that feels like it could be a lost Laurel Canyon classic.
What is quality songwriting if not an exercise in delving into your own psyche? Amsterdam singer-songwriter Jana Mila discovered the therapy hidden within the craft when working on her debut release ‘Chameleon’; initially when writing the title track, Mila thought it to be about a friend who seemed to be constantly changing herself to please others, but the more she worked on the track, the more she saw she was actually writing about herself. “You should know / That I’ll be whoever you want / You will be the color that I hide in,” she offers with beautiful honesty, her voice soft and lilting as she delivers the chorus with the kind of innate ease Joni Mitchell displayed at her 1970s peak.
The album’s opening track, ‘Like Only Lovers Could’, showcases some stunning harmonies, Mila’s voice smooth and enchanting against producer Todd Lombardo’s backing vocals and jangly, acoustic guitar. And while it’s those great vocals that initially draw you in, Mila’s lyrics are strong, too, in their straightforward poetry: “Peel my skin / ‘Til I have nothing but your warmth / Your arms to hold onto.” With its catchy beat, ‘Somebody New’ doesn’t shy away from pop sensibilities, but still keeps things safely within the bounds of folky Americana. The softness and simplicity of ‘Love Let Go’ brings to mind Mouldy Peaches’ Kimya Dawson, as Mila reflects with bitter-free sadness about the end of a relationship: “Oh, we tried and tried / And even though / Love let go / It let go of both of us / Soft and slow / It slipped through our hands.”
‘I Wasn’t Gonna’ dabbles in 70s pop-rock with its radio friendly, soaring hook of a chorus: “I wasn’t gonna cry / I wasn’t gonna scream / I wasn’t gonna fight / I wasn’t gonna make a scene.” The buoyant ‘It’s True’ sees Mila wrestling with similar themes to the title track as she comes to understand you can’t change yourself to please others, while ‘Let Me In’ finds her wanting to be absorbed completely into the object of her desire so she can know them fully and forever. The Brandi Carlile-esque ‘In Between’ finds Mila struggling to stay in the moment with the pace of modern life: “All these faces I don’t know / They’re all laughing, did I miss the joke / All these moments, can’t I just have one / The feeling is lost before it’s even come / If I can’t seem / To find my place in between.”
“Rosie left the backdoor open yesterday / She didn’t even leave a note / Before she took the train,” begins the complex ‘Rosie’ – at first a simple tale of a girl who goes missing that goes on to explore nuanced emotions like loneliness and grief – was first performed by Mila when she was just 17-years-old, but is so special of a song that it ended up anchoring her record deal. ‘The City’ is a haunting, string laden musing on the imprints people leave on the places that they’ve been: “You can’t close your eyes / To stop the time / The world’s not made for goodbyes / But the city saves a tale / About everyone.”
Songwriting, like all good therapy should, has changed Mila for the better and allowed her to see her past self in a different way. “Sometimes when I sing those songs I wrote years ago, I feel like an older sister talking to my younger self,” she recently reflected, asking herself: “Oh, did you really think that back then? Did you really have to be so dramatic?” In the years ahead, as Mila changes and grows, she can look back on “Chameleon” with pride as a solid debut that acts as a time capsule for her emotions via the medium of well executed, beautifully written songs.
