Musician and landscape designer, Jennifer.

By JT Thompson

Jennifer is a musician, landscape designer, and devoted parent who began her life in a homogenous WASP neighborhood in New York City, and now thrives in the multicultural richness of living in Union Square.

In the early ‘90s she had national success in a band called The Story, singing harmony with her college friend Jonatha Brooke. After the band broke up in ’94, Jennifer went on to find happiness in the local music scene, in parenting, and in the mix of indoor and outdoor work in her landscape design career.

Before Jennifer and I meet, I buy her most recent album, Avocet, released March 3, 2017, which developed out of a studio recording session that her husband gave to her as a birthday present. The songs are lush, gentle, and intricately beautiful; it’s hard to categorize the music, which moves gracefully between Americana, folk, and indie pop.

“Labels are challenging,” says Jennifer. “I didn’t grow up with folk music and I’ve only recently really embraced it. But because I have a pretty voice and play acoustic guitar, people think I’m a folk musician. My own reference points for chords come more from pop music and classical. It’s funny – the way your music is categorized has more to do with your community, with who you hang out with – than it does with what it actually sounds like.”

The literate, vivid song lyrics on Avocet are full of serene rural imagery – rivers, barns, valleys, trees, birds – and celebrate a deeply felt tenderness: the quiet joys of watching babies sleep, of family love, of reading in bed to each other. There is also a clear-eyed appreciation of sorrow and pain in her writing, but she mostly, and successfully, expresses one of the hardest experiences to communicate compellingly: day to day happiness.

Jennifer and I meet at bloc 11; as I sit waiting at a table by a window, I see her ride up on her bicycle, wearing a loose, flowing green shirt and a ‘90s looking straw boater hat with a black ribbon. She takes off the hat as she sits down, and we start talking.

As a child, Jennifer lived on the Upper East Side of NYC, “in an expensive high rise apartment where all the tenants were white people. The buildings just north, just four or five stories tall, were all people of color. No WASPS went further north than 96th Street.

“I don’t miss that. Park Avenue used to seem so big and beautiful to me, the tall buildings, the tulips in the median. It seems so small to me now, so provincial. Very narrow, a tiny cultural bandwith.”

Music was a big part of Jennifer’s life from childhood on.

“My mom took me to the Philharmonic. All the ‘powers that be’ were there, Leonard Bernstein, Michael Tilson Thomas. They were bringing the big symphonies to kids. They’d take all the seats out of the hall and give us a little piece of shag carpet to sit on. They called it a ‘rug concert.’ They’d introduce us to all the instruments, have them play the themes of the characters in Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf before the music would begin. It really turned me on to that kind of music.”

Nature and small town life were also part of her life from childhood on.

“We lived near Central Park. Trees and grass and flowers were all accessible, not so far away. And Mom’s parents were part of the arts community in Lyme, Connecticut. We were often there for the agricultural fair in August. There were things like competitions for bulls pulling heavy weights, the owners cracking a whip, teams following each other. I loved it. The cotton candy, the one little ferris wheel. Lyme also had a great little 4th of July parade.

“When I think about what I love about America, one thing that comes to mind is that parade. There were maybe 40 people in it, young and old. The local doctor would read from the Declaration of Independence, give a passionate speech of his own, and fire off a miniature cannon.

“The other thing I think of is the bicentennial in NYC. The tall ships in the river, millions of people celebrating – it was all so palpable. I love both.

“The small town part is what I love about Somerville.”

Jennifer went to college in Amherst, MA, where she met fellow musician Jonatha Brooke. They started performing together and in the years after graduating, their band The Story was picked up by the label Elektra.

“We sold around 100,000 records. It felt like a million! At first, we were called a folk band. But when we began selling a lot of records, they started calling us pop. On the radio – back when you could still get on the radio! – DJs would play us after Sting: Fields of Gold, after So Much Mine.”

While The Story was gaining popularity, Jennifer worked part time at the publishing house Little, Brown designing book jackets.

“I’ve always had one foot in visual arts, one in music.”

It was her desire to live the life of a musician which eventually led Jennifer to settle in Somerville. Her first local home, around ’86, ’87, was in Teele Square.

“I’ve basically lived in and around Somerville since then. I did spend a couple years in Newton, a year in Boston and Cambridge. I tried the established married life in Natick for a few years, but that was not for me. I left it behind and went back to Somerville. It was a place you could afford to live as a musician.”

After about four years on the public stage, during which they put out two well-reviewed and popular albums, The Story dissolved in ’94.

“I didn’t know if I would continue making a living as a musician. In The Story I played the role of harmony singer. But I figured out how to write songs, made a demo and got a record deal with PolyGram. They put out my first solo album in 1998.”

Jennifer’s marriage ended in the year after she quit The Story. She met Ry Cavenaugh in 1997 and they had a son in 2004.

“When I first met Ry, I was on the road a lot. And the solo touring life was beginning to lose its allure. I missed the musical conversation, playing with a trio, even a duo, and was able to find that by looking at the local scene. I could play at Club Passim or the Lizard Lounge with a band, and then sleep in my own bed at home. It was great.

“Ry and I started the band Maybe Baby, with Duke Levine and Billy Beard. We made one record and played locally for a couple of years – until we HAD a baby! And then the band was over. In the midst of making that Maybe Baby record, my mom was diagnosed with lung cancer. And died nine weeks later. I was about to turn 40. And all of a sudden it was so clear that if I wanted to have a child of my own this was it. I’d better get going. We were super lucky and Waylon was born about a year later.

“All those big life changes all at the same time. The joy of having a kid. The devastating loss of a parent. It was the first big loss for me. And I felt so sad that we hadn’t really healed all the mother/daughter stuff. Hadn’t gotten to the bottom of it all. Although we had tried.

“Ry and I bought a fixer-upper house just outside Union Square – still a work in progress!

“What I love about Union is walking everywhere. I like that kind of small city life. People say hello on the sidewalk, the front steps, walking down the street.

“Back in the day – ’98-2000 – I’d walk to the Tir Na Nog, which is Bull McCabe’s now, to hear Ry’s band The Vinal Avenue String Band. There was no TV, everyone was really into the music. And the Guinness! It really felt like ‘community’.

“I love the neighborhood feel of Union. Reliable Market. Bombay Market. Now there’s places like Union Donuts. But I love that Union has retained its multicultural feel. NYC is, of course, so multicultural, but the neighborhood where I grew up was not. I love that there are people from all over the world in Union.

“And I like some of the new places, Journeyman, Bronwyn. Grooves, the record shop. Gracie’s ice cream is fabulous. All the restaurants. And Club Passim, the Lizard Lounge are an easy walk. I love not having to drive to a grocery store or a post office or a clothing store.”

I ask her about her working life.

“I have a bunch of different jobs. I do landscape design, I have some of my own clients. I draw for other people. One aspect of the job is being the girl out there planting, digging, climbing trees. Hard physical work. And I learned to draw landscape plans by hand. I love that, not working on a computer. I love things like the different weights of pencil lines – the exactness required in rendering a landscape plan by hand.

“Music is a whole different business now. I’m not really touring now. Although my holiday project Wintery Songs in Eleventy Part Harmony is about to launch its 8th annual shows! I do yearn for the language of music, the particular challenges of writing songs, making words go with melodies. Somehow it comes to me in two dimensions, and then becomes three. I’ll always do it. It can be hard work – but so gratifying. From getting ideas jotted down, to writing about those ideas, to sitting down with my guitar.”

I ask her what she loves most about her life now.

Jennifer laughs, and says, “How many more hours do you have?

“Waylon and Ry and being a family is so incredible and beautiful. It can be difficult at times. It’s life changing – having a kid.

“You feel that connection to your parents and their parents, and their parents. The Chinese call it the red thread, which connects you to the past and the future, to your parents and grandparents and on back – and through your kid to the future.

“I love my life in Union Square. Doing a little music, a little landscape design, a little parenting. Less now that he’s heading into the teenage era.

“I love being able to walk to all the places I need to go. I love being part of a Sanctuary City, that we agree with our elected officials. It’s such an international place.”

“Are other things you love about America as a whole coming to mind?”

“That’s a hard one.” Jennifer sits back and thinks a moment. “The freedom to do what you want. To reinvent yourself, become who you want to become. It’s not as easy to do that in, say, Ireland, where we lived for a year. You have a place you’re born into there. Getting “bigger than your boots” isn’t looked well on.

“But here – people reinvent themselves all the time. My grandparents were artists. My parents went the business route. My generation is more artists and musicians.” She nods thoughtfully.

“Are there things about America you think are great?”

Jennifer lights up. “Yes! Baseball…national parks…voting. That you can travel across borders. It’s so fascinating to see what’s going to happen with these freaking walls.

“The freedom to move through the world and find your place. Rather than just stay in your zone of comfort. Some people are happy doing that. Some people need to move, to push outside our comfort zones, to figure out where we fit in.”

Jennifer is certainly living out that freedom, moving easily between a variety of zones she has created for herself, with her music, her career, her family, and her neighborhood. She’s long left behind the homogenous community in which she grew up and has found a multicultural, diverse life for herself in Union Square.

The happiness expressed so beautifully in her album Avocet is deeply rooted in her daily life – she is exploring and expressing the many different sides of herself, and finding happiness and joy in them all.

Since this interview Jennifer has taken on a part-time job as Executive Director of a non-profit called COGdesign.