Flock of Dimes’ new album breaks out
Jenn Wasner finds herself, with a little help from friends
In 2016, when the wildly prolific multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Jenn Wasner released her first solo album as Flock of Dimes, she felt she had something to prove.
“I had internalized a lot of the assumptions that people make about women in music,” said Wasner, then best known as one-half of the indierock duo Wye Oak. “I felt a lot of resentment about not getting the benefit of the doubt of my own artistry.” So she doubled down on that time-tested indie ethos of Do It Yourself — writing, producing and playing just about every instrument on “If You See Me, Say Yes.”
“As it turns out,” Wasner, 34, recalled in a recent video chat from her home near Durham, North Carolina, “that’s not always what makes the best record.”
“If You See Me” is full of dazzling sounds and bright melodic ideas, but it stimulates the mind more frequently than it pierces the heart. “As someone who is very obsessed with language, I think sometimes it can actually be a barrier to feeling,” Wasner added, lounging on a sage-green sofa that — she suddenly realized, catching a glimpse of her digital reflection in the Zoom screen — was the same color as the cozy sweatshirt she was wearing.
“Head of Roses,” the second Flock of Dimes full-length, out Friday, is that better record — one of the highlights of Wasner’s long, winding career. It’s also the project that revealed a creative paradox: Sometimes what an artist needs to become even more of herself is a little help from her friends.
“I got the impression she was trying to get out of her head,” said Nick Sanborn, half of the electro-pop band Sylvan Esso, who coproduced “Head of Roses” with Wasner. “Being her friend, it’s obvious that her range is so broad and encompasses so many different things.”
A respected veteran of the underground music scene, Wasner is multifaceted almost to a fault, in a music industry obsessed with elevator pitches and genre-based pigeonholing. “Because I’m drawn to experimenting with so many different kinds of aesthetic choices,” she said, “people are often like, ‘I don’t really know what you do. We don’t know where to put you.’”
“But that’s just a big part of who I am, and not something I want to change about myself,” she added. “It’s a source of joy.”
Even in Wye Oak, formed in 2006, Wasner and her bandmate, Andy Stack, seem allergic to repeating themselves. After garnering acclaim for “Civilian,” a breakout 2011 album full of off-kilter rhythms and Wasner’s inventive guitar playing, they followed it with a record centered around synthesizers, “Shriek,” in 2014. Their most recent EP, “No Horizon” from 2020, prominently featured choral arrangements sung by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus.
Wasner and Stack are both Baltimore natives who met in high school. They were in “one of those bands where everybody writes songs,” Stack recalled over the phone, though when the 16-year-old Wasner brought hers to practice, it was clear her compositions were a cut above the standard battleof-the-bands fare.
Wasner and Stack have now been playing music together for more than half their lives. The key to Wye Oak’s longevity, Stack said, has been allowing each other to pursue other musical projects in their spare time.