There’s something about the expression “Americana” that is so impossible to define. It is green velvet curtains sewn into a dress, a bald eagle painted on the drum of a 100-year-old banjo or the mottled brown glaze of an amateur ceramic vase. It’s anyone who picks up the acoustic guitar and cares to sing along with it. Madison unsigned musician Whitney Mann, who pulls from artists Johnny Cash, Alison Krauss, Willie Nelson, Jenny Lewis, M. Ward, Bonnie Raitt and Junior Brown to accumulate her sound, has felt this ambivalence when asked to confine her music to a genre.
“We would call it Americana or folk. Simply because sometimes when you say we play country music, people stray away from that. They think we mean like Garth Brooks and terrible country songs. I would say it’s Americana, kind of ‘roots’ music,” Mann said.
Whitney Mann sticks to the simple life. She currently plays songs by request every third Sunday at The Alchemy Caf?, as well as a scattering of venues around the state, but is not actively pursuing a record deal. However, the singer/songwriter/soft acoustic guitar strummer does have a secret something to kick performances up a notch.
“I do have a pair of brown leather cowboy-ish boots that I wear onstage,” Mann said. “Some people call them my Superman boots. I’m pretty reserved and quiet and outside of that, so as soon as put on my Superman boots, I take on a different personality onstage.”
For Mann, the idea of having roots is multi faceted. When asked if she originates from the Madison area she had a quick and honest response.
“Nope, I’m from Camden, Michigan, which is a super small city on the border of Indiana and Ohio. So right where all three states come together, that’s where I am. I like [Madison] a lot. I didn’t like it at first, but I love it now. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. We just bought a house,” Mann said.
The “we” encompasses herself and Kyle Jacobson, who is the bass player, manager and overall supportive force behind Mann and her music. Other band members include Tim Russell on the drums and Andrew Harrison on the pedal steel player,.
“I worked as a photojournalist after school. I went to the University of Michigan, and so then I moved to Rockford [Illinois], which is where I met Kyle. We were both photojournalists there for the ABC affiliate,” Mann said, describing her pre-Madison journey. “In Rockford, Kyle and I started playing music together, and then he moved up here to work at the ABC affiliate and I moved to Colorado to work for the CBS affiliate.”
Colorado may seem like a paradise for a folk singer like Mann, with lonesome, wide open spaces and the sky painted by the sun. However, the setting was too barren for Mann’s tender heart and lacked the inspiration she required.
“I didn’t like Colorado. It was too far away from everything. I missed Kyle, so I moved to Madison, found a job, and that’s when we started the official band.”
Mann already has her second studio-recorded album in the works, the first being a six song EP called The Way Back Home released last year. The recording process was a beautiful adventure for the artist and her band.
“It was all recorded live, so no overdubs on my vocals or anything. We just played as a band in one room all together. We recorded it all pretty much in one day… which is pretty intense,” Mann recalled. “We had songs that I really liked and I thought would fit really well as a bunch. I had just finished writing ‘Call the Cops,’ which is my favorite song from the album, and I remember when I was recording it I had my notebook with the lyrics because I hadn’t played it enough to memorize it.”
Mann clearly isn’t an artist to mechanically crunch out songs for a deadline. Rather, she seems to rely upon instincts, emotions and soul for her lyrical musings.
“My grandma died a few years ago and the last thing she said was ‘If I die, leave my body dead.’ And so that was the catalyst for the song ‘I Said,’ which is one of the songs on the EP,” Mann said. “I say this, where I’ll come up with a line in the shower and just sing it over and over again, and when I get out I’ll have a verse of a song, and then I’ll go from there. That makes me think of something, and then I’ll build up that line and try to think of something that builds the story around it.”
The sweet-sounding melodies sung by Mann’s metallic yet sultry vocals cannot dispel the sadness encompassed in a majority of her lyrics. And she has a reckoning as to why she finds the beauty in a broken heart, one that rings with truth.
“All of my songs on [The Way Back Home] are really sad for some reason, and I don’t really necessarily know why that is, but a lot of times when you’re happy you can listen to sad songs and happy songs, but when you’re sad you can’t listen to happy songs. So, my point of view is that sad songs are the universal song. You can listen to them when you’re in any kind of mood,” Mann said.
“I don’t know if that’s why I write [them], but I feel like sometimes as a listener I would prefer to listen to a really stripped down, sad song than lots of drums and electric guitars. That’s what I prefer as a listener, so I think that carries on to how I am as a writer.”
