Check out this recent single from Virginia based singer-songwriter Karen Jonas. Fluttering guitar and gorgeous piano rise from layers of vintage instrumentation, including flourishes of pedal steel by Ahren Buchheister and fiddle from Bobby Hawk, in the well-crafted ‘Gold in the Sand’. Jonas possesses a distinctive, silky voice that is perfect for a heartfelt song like this. Jonas is a storyteller and this is a romantic tale a couple eloping to Vegas. She says of the song’s subject: “It’s an against-all-odds love story, a starry-eyed late-night wedding, the sweet optimism of love at first sight. I pictured a very zoomed out and very zoomed in Vegas as I wrote this, a drone image of a city rising from the desert, and her hand tightly in his as they walk down the neon-lit midnight Strip.” Writing about romantic love in a way that is engaging, openhearted and feels authentic is a gift that Karen Jonas displays time and again.
This is from Jonas’s 7th album, ‘The Rise and Fall of American Kitsch’, due for release on 9th August 2024. After watching Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 film ‘Elvis’ on a plane, the prolific Jonas wrote eight songs in as many days in a burst of creativity. Those songs would form the heart of the new album. Inspired by post-war consumerism, Jonas says of the album’s central theme: “The ’50s birthed the concept that we can and should buy things we don’t really need. Post-war factories, the baby boom, suburbia: we started manufacturing an idea of joy that we still sell today. With every new invention and fashion trend, something else lands in the trash. It keeps me up at night. Our kids are inheriting a shopping habit and a huge pile of garbage.” She’s not wrong. And Jonas manages to capture this in beautiful melody and gorgeously sweeping, vintage-sounding sonic layers. Lovely stuff.
