Episode Details

Singer-songwriter Jess Klein stopped by Live & Local this week, following the release of her latest album “Dreaming Aloud.”

Visit JessKlein.com.

“I started writing it a couple years ago,” says Klein of the album, her first since 2023’s “When We Rise.” “I have a belief that we have a lot more agency and power inside ourselves than we maybe have been conditioned to think we do – so trying to reclaim our ability to imagine a better world, and then to make it happen, that’s a recurring theme for me. It’s a bunch of songs about trying to dream of something better.”

“Dreaming Aloud” is a ten-song aural feast, opening with a nostalgic title track inspired by a recent college reunion and closing with the rousing call to action “All It’ll Take.”

“I am done being small,” she sings on that final track. “I am here, and you are here, and there’s a new world we can make, and all we need is to want it.”

Those lyrics feel almost Lennonesque, but it wasn’t the Beatles she was aspiring to: Klein says her initial vision for “Dreaming Aloud” was “something like a cross between Astral Weeks and Led Zeppelin II.”

“And the funny thing is, when I said that to my producer (longtime collaborator Mark Addison), he was like, ‘cool, we can do that,'” she says with a laugh. “Both those albums make interesting use of space and ensemble, (and) I wanted to create something with a group of musicians, where I was willing to just trust what they were going to do whenever they stepped forward…

“I also wanted this to be acoustic-driven,” she adds. “I wanted the space for my voice to stretch out and to see what happens if we allow room for each other, a little bit more than I had in the past. That just felt like an important attitude to go in to both this album and my life.”

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