The Wailin’ Jennys might just have the coolest name in modern music. The obvious but clever pun on country music legend Waylon Jennings’s name is memorable, rhetorically satisfying, and translates broadly across cultural divides. It symbolizes folk music’s ability to span generations. And it was also an accident.
.. The Jennys understand the difficulty of writing lyrics that sound new but at the same time have a genuine folksiness. For example, the song “Apocalypse Lullaby,” a title that certainly seems post-modern, is inherently soothing. The lyrics sound new, and probably couldn’t have come from a far away time period, but they seem authentic somehow. When Chvostek sings “Spin the speed of light/Tetrahedron blue/One last paradise/You can make for you,” it sounds like bluegrass self help for the modern er
.. What’s great about The Jennys is that, no matter how things change, they seem to understand their music and what the genre means in this era of arrogance, cultural indulgence and corporatism.