Chicago-based Jenny Gillespie was born in 1980 in Springfield, IL. Her mother, a landscape painter, introduced Jenny to Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell at an early age. Within a month, Jenny's first concerts at age seven were Dolly Parton and Dionne Warwick--and the show(wo)manship and loveliness of both made her want to become a singer. Growing up in a rural area, surrounded by woods and water, imprinted a sense of natural beauty and freedom on Jenny's artistic sensibility.
She adopted her mother's Martin guitar at age 12 and set out on a course to write and perform her own music. Attending college at the University of Virginia, Jenny took classes in the history of jazz, creative writing and anthropology while performing in the area, as well as traveling to New York to perform several times at the Living Room. She also studied in Paris where she performed at jazz clubs and met musicians and artists who further flooded her perspective with the passion for creating.
Jenny recorded her first EP, 2004's alt-country-tinged Love and Ammunition, while living in Austin, TX where she was studying for a master's in creative writing at the University of Texas. She offered a free album download on Creative Commons Internet Archive, and it has since been downloaded 25,000 times.In 2004 Jenny moved back to her home state of Illinois, settling in Chicago. Over the first few years there, she put together a band and began recording in 2008 at Steve Albini's Electrical Audio. The recordings would become the album Light Year, which has been critically hailed as the harbinger of a new sound in Jenny's musical output. The album is polished folk-pop, and has been compared to Bon Iver and Annie Lennox.
She recently finished recording a new album Kindred produced by Darwin Smith. The album was recorded in the living room of a rambling old house in Wilmette, IL. Gary Newcomb (Richard Buckner, Gary Newcomb Trio) lends pedal steel, Dony Wynn (Robert Palmer, Steve Winwood) plays drums, Steve Bernal (Bill Callahan, Calla) adds cello and bass, and Steve Moore (Laura Veirs, Sufjan Stevens, Bill Frisell) contributes keys and brass. Besides singing, Jenny plays electric and acoustic guitars, synths, piano, and percussion. The album's lush, intense yet delicate soundscapes lean towards experimental and electronica atmospheres. It will be released in 2010. Join the mailing list for more updates.