Jordana

Jordana’s mission is simple: keep trying to be her, even when it's hard. So it's no surprise perseverance and self-discovery are central themes on the upcoming record Face The Wall, out May 20th on Grand Jury.

“It can be something as simple as realizing I wanted to go vegan, or that it didn’t matter that I liked both girls and boys. Or it could be something as complex as God,” she says moving into a conversation about the Maryland church her family attended as a child. “It was a big part of my upbringing. I really tried to reconcile that with my identity as I started to mature, but I got older and realized it just wasn't me. I had to face that fact.”

But carving her path -- being who she wasn't in order to find out who she actually was -- is part of what Face The Wall (“and life!” Jordana points out) is all about. “I don't know if I would have found the violin if I didn't have that church part of my upbringing,” Jordana wonders aloud, tossing out jokes about how the experience of watching someone playing at her church would eventually turn her into an “orchestra rat,” or how it led her to busking on the boardwalk of her town of North Beach, Maryland as a 13-year-old.

But Jordana didn’t find herself on stage until she truly found herself on an iPod Touch, where she cobbled together homespun pop songs on a GarageBand app in her bedroom that catapulted her to where she is today. Since debuting that first bedroom pop single “Jackie’s 15” on Bandcamp at 17, Jordana’s amassed a legion of online followers and fans, collaborated with a fellow rising stars like the producer MELVV, Magdalena Bay, and TV Girl, and landed a contract with the NYC mainstay indie label Grand Jury.

In 2020, she released a slew of singles and two EPs, Something to Say and To You, during a year in which most artists found themselves flailing under lockdown. But despite all of her success, the future didn’t gleam as brightly as promised: relationships dissolved, she moved across the country alone, and the world got pretty depressing for everyone. So, while Face the Wall is Jordana’s most confident and kaleidoscopic album to date, it’s also a direct confrontation with the self that traffics in catharsis over pathos, empowerment over defeat.

The relationships Jordana’s made with other musicians wouldn’t have been possible without social media, where she met the people she now counts as close friends and collaborators. “I’ve been on Twitter and Instagram since I was 12 or 13 and have met a lot of people just by being online, including lasting friendships made through my Strokes fan pages,” she says, laughing. “It’s weird to take a step back and analyze how you got somewhere. I met some people on a website, moved to a different state, made a lot of lifelong besties, got a tour offer from one of my favorite bands (TV Girl), signed a deal, moved to New York, and now I’m about to tour on my own to promote an album with a producer I worked with in LA.” When her management team reached out via DM, Jordana worried it could’ve been a scam, but when they flew her out to New York from Wichita to meet them, she knew she was, in her words, “living the dream.” “Twitter can be a cursed place,” Jordana says, but she loves it for what it gave her: a community.

While the lyrics on Face the Wall seem to be hellbent on self-betterment, the instrumentation and production proves that Jordana’s talent is big enough to buoy her nascent career. Though her earliest songs were self-produced, she unearths new possibilities in collaboration and working alongside friends on this album made the experience of mining these ideas a little less lonely. “My work ethic has gotten so much better, and I’m grateful for that,” she says, acknowledging that sometimes you need someone else to help spark inspiration.

That resolution, to seek out the slivers of light in the dimmest corridors, makes Face the Wall a triumphant album, one Jordana considers the apex of her career thus far. “It’s hard to even think that I could write something better than this in the future, it feels like my best work,” she says, a bit nervously, then pauses for what feels like a full minute. “But I’ll figure it out. Even if it’s hard.”