Turning the Page: Jennifer O'Connor

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WHEN JENNIFER O'CONNOR reveals that her upcoming album will consist mainly of love songs, one question comes to mind: functional or dysfunctional love songs?

Her stunning 2006 Matador release, "Over the Mountain, Across the Valley and Back to the Stars," was a rarity — a confessional singer-songwriter record for people who cannot abide confessional singer-songwriters. (Should you normally love them, God, are you a shoo-in.) The trick was a sort of blunt understatement, with lyrics candidly tracing the outlines of loves lost to accident, illness, distance and indifference. Her breathy but deceptively strong alto filled in the emotional contours.

O'Connor told true stories of her two dead sisters — one killed in a car crash, the other by brain cancer. She sang of star-crossed lovers offered apologies too late, once they'd already spun off toward new constellations.

"There's a lot of breakup songs on [that] record," O'Connor admits. When it drops mid-August, the new disc, "Here With Me," will feature more a "falling-in-love kind of love song." The reason? O'Connor writes what she knows, and after long, brutal years, her luck has started to change. "There's a new relationship that kind of runs through the record, and then some dealing with aftermaths from the difficult issues that I'd stressed upon on, I think, on the last record.

"Someone actually said to me recently that they thought that it was happier thematically but a little bit darker musically," she laughs, "kinda a flip of the last record. I don't know if that's necessarily true, but I thought that was kind of interesting."

Tune into O'Connor's MySpace page, and you'll hear "Valley Road '86," something of a throwback to earlier themes. A memory sketch of stolen cigarettes, a frozen bus ride, a jacket's frayed collar, it closes with a goodbye: "I never will forget you/I never will forget you both/I never will forget."

"That song's maybe my final word on the subjects," she explains. "It's just taken up so much of my life the last 10 years and been such a part of who I am and the kind of things I've written about."

» 9:30 Club, 815 V St. NW; with Jamie Lidell, Thu., $15; 703-218-6500.(U St.-Cardozo)

Written by Express contributor Glenn Dixon
Photo by John Von Pamer