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Flying High
Diana Jones Presents Her High Atmosphere At Joe’s Pub
Photo: Alan Messer
Her unprecedented musicality took off in 2006 with My Remembrance of You and continued with 2009’s Better Times Will Come. Diana Jones returns to Joe’s Pub with her third highly anticipated album High Atmosphere.
With High Atmosphere Jones has continued along her remarkable career arc as a singer-songwriter and visual artist. As Bill Friskics-Warren pointed out in his New York Times profile, Jones “approaches the mountain-ballad tradition not as a curiosity or antique but as a renewable vernacular that’s just as capable of speaking to the human condition now as it was 80 years ago.”
“The songs I write,” said Jones, “are informed by my experiences within a certain time frame, so they become a sort of world within themselves. For this new record, I was on the road a lot, trying to catch up to myself and the things that were happening in my life.”
With her fresh and distinctive voice within folk music, it may come as a surprise that Jones was trained early on as a classical vocalist. Adopted at a young age, Jones located her birth family in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains in east Tennessee in her late 20’s. The reconnection made Jones’ deep affinity for Anglo-Celtic traditional music begin to make sense.
Time spent with her biological grandfather, Robert Lee Maranville, brought on an epiphany. Jones developed a love for her family’s musical traditions, and describes her place in it, as both simple and complex. “I found my own voice through my grandfather,” said Jones.
When her grandfather died in 2000, Jones holed up in a cabin in the woods of Massachusetts and wrote music. Six years and many filled notebooks later she had the material for My Remembrance of You. The album earned Jones a nomination as Best Emerging Artist at the Folk Alliance Awards, leading to tours with Richard Thompson and Mary Gauthier.
While the cover portraits on her last two albums show Jones’ serious side, she appears on the cover of High Atmosphere with hand over heart and eyes closed in a smile of apparent contentment. That image “speaks to the internal process of writing for me,” Jones said.