With touring an impossibility during lockdown, Jeni brimmed with songs. "A Body is A Delicate House" is her studio album from the lockdown period – first released as a hand-pressed CD in fall of 2021. After a successful limited pressing, she had the album remastered by Martin Stansbury of Cacophony Cottage Studios and factory pressed in 2022.
In this release and in her other lockdown release "I Fell Into the Fire," she returns to Jewell Ridge for stories as well as finding inspiration in the life of her late music mentor, Norman Cross.
The physical CD comes with a 46-page booklet complete with essays, liner notes, lyrics, and collages made by Jeni by hand.
From the conclusion to Jeni's liner notes:
"Every little thing I’ve done in my terrestrial life has pointed me toward this calling – to watch and note, to report back, to listen for broadcasts from the spirit and from those who have crossed to the other side. My delicate house has an antenna which is always switched on for particular messages. This has always been my way. It’s just how I was made in the same way that I always woosh into a chair without calculating the risk, in the same way that I have one squinty eye like Dad, like Grandaddy, the newspaper men, the reporters.
These songs are my reading and translation of what I’ve heard in the recent worldwide news from the firmament and the spirit. Bless those who whisper these messages and the celestial currents that carry them.
There’ll be loaves, there’ll be fishes
– the answer in your hands.
And you’ll tell it all to me
when you reach the promise land.
Amen, Dad. Amen."
Includes unlimited streaming of A Body is a Delicate House
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
...more
For my Dad, Greg Hankins, 1956-2016.
Your Yellow Bike
Dad had a wonderful secondhand, Italian, yellow bike when we lived in Boston. It was stolen outside a bodega. I used to be amazed at the way Dad would get on and off his bike – riding on one leg at first and then swinging his other leg over the saddle after he got underway. Dad loved eels and he loved his friend Dave Butterfield who died of Lou Gherig’s disease, he loved the idea of Atlantis, keeping chickens, growing vegetables, making banjos together, and learning tunes. He was a polymath, a serial hobbyist, and an absolutely stellar Dad. I miss him so much that I write about him a lot. When my sister and I were kids, he used to carry us on his bike in a plastic seat that fit behind his. By the time he got his yellow bike, I was learning to ride my own small bike. So, I had to write about him and me and Bob Dylan and his yellow bike.
lyrics
Your Yellow Bike
for Greg Hankins on 24 July 2020
Do you swim amongst the eels
all their mysteries revealed –
their new initiate
in the deep Sargasso Sea?
Keeping counsel in the weeds,
Atlantis down the street.
A well-deserved rest
with the fish that you loved best.
Are you with your old friend Dave?
With Jesus breaking bread?
Picking John the Baptist’s mind
‘bout the tablets left behind?
All religions now refined
into a greater truth.
The joy of the now –
the eternal kissing booth.
If I had your yellow bike,
I’d ride it everywhere
singing Bob Dylan songs.
We wouldn’t care.
We’d be loud and we’d be free.
You on a trip with me.
You’re on this trip with me
just like you said you’d be.
Just like you said you’d be.
Are you out among the stars
where Mawmaw knows you are
looking down with a grin,
camera-shy again.
I have a picture of you
in the gap in my front tooth.
You’re the fox who came to tea –
the busy bumble bee.
You know you’re everywhere –
a pilgrim on the move,
a dragonfly’s wing,
grit in my daily groove,
the spine of my book,
the squint in my eye.
You shed your skin,
but you never said goodbye.
Those old rags and bones
were a temporary thing.
You wear a mantle of stardust
in a house beneath the sea.
There’ll be loaves,
there’ll be fishes,
the answer in your hands.
You’ll tell it all to me
when I reach the promised land.
Let’s play an old familiar song
with a well-worn melody
about a famous meeting
in Heaven’s Jubilee.
You’ll play your old banjo,
I’ll play your old guitar. We’ll sing it all together,
so we know just where we are.
I saw you in the moon –
overalls and baseball cap
with a rooster at your heels,
a parade of dogs and cats.
You were spreading the good news,
you were gathering the peas,
you were growing this new tune
just to send it out to me.
credits
from A Body is a Delicate House,
released December 13, 2022
Written by Jeni Hankins, Lulu Wall Music, BMI.
Jeni Hankins – Vocal, Guitar, and Trombone
Alfred John Hickling – Harmony and all other instruments
Jeni Hankins grew up in the coalfields of Appalachian in Southwest Virginia among a family of miners, moonshiners, and
journalists. Her writing pulls the grit, gumption, and keen sense of observation out of that heritage like drawing water from her grandmother’s well.
In every song, Jeni’s “true sense of place shines through – old as the hills, but brand new at the same time.”...more
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