Words By Zach Collier
Photos By Ivan Martinez // With Research From Andy McFerren
Rising pop star Jane Beeson is about to drop a new record. Its lead singles discuss personal loss, religion, self acceptance, and young adulthood. Thematically, they seem to indicate that plucking from the Tree of Life is a personal endeavor.
One time I stood next to Jane Beeson during an entire Killers concert. Before it began, I said hi and waved. She smiled and politely waved back. And then, as two complete strangers do, we didn’t speak again the rest of the night.
Except in a weird turn of events, we weren’t strangers.
Well, kind of. You see, we’re from the same town, and I’d been a judge at a local talent competition where she put on one of the greatest indie sets I’ve ever seen.
I had also just spent an entire spring delivering 30,000 copies of a free local music magazine door to door. Beeson’s face was on the cover and I had edited the story about her.
In an even weirder turn of events, I had exchanged emails with her dad that very morning. He wanted some extra copies of said magazine.
Beeson didn’t recognize me because we’d only ever communicated through writing: emails, Instagram, handwritten feedback on a 50-point judge’s rubric. But we had never actually met. She didn’t recognize me. But I recognized her.
Believe me when I say the socio-informational imbalance generated by this two second greeting made for an incredibly awkward way to watch Ronnie Vannucci Jr. absolutely murder his drums for two hours straight.
I told Beeson about this in a packed cocktail lounge in Los Angeles a year later. We’d gotten to know each other some since then, and had just grabbed dinner at Canter's next door with a ragtag outfit of rogues, misfits, and ne'er-do-wells: photographer Ivan Martinez, author Andy McFerren, bassist Alessandro Improta, and illustrator Casey Beifuss. Now we were about to watch her friend’s band play a set in the Kibitz Room. We were crammed in the back at the bar by the bathrooms.
“I knew you looked familiar during that concert!” Beeson said. “I couldn’t figure it out.”
I then told her that was the first time we had ever met in person, but Andy and Sandro told me that wasn’t true. Apparently, all of us had actually met at a backyard listening party in Utah three summers before, where local artists took turns sharing their unreleased tracks with each other. Beeson had shared an early version of her song “Pink Light.”
“Around the time I released ‘Pink Light’ was when I decided to send it on the music thing,” Beeson said. She told us she had a really fun release party and a ton of fans came, and it made her realize just how fulfilling and precious it was to build community and start conversations through her music.
Then the bartender scolded me because I was standing in front of the fire extinguisher. “You can’t stand there. You gotta move!” So I stepped to the side. Then he said, “No, man. Now you’re behind the bar. What are you doing? Get out of here.” Then I spilled my Red Bull on myself.
So, there it is: the story of how I broke fire code and spilled a drink on myself while recounting an awkward Killers concert encounter with Jane Beeson.
What does any of this have to do with Jane Beeson’s new music?
You see, as a music journalist and introvert-by-nature, I’m chronically online. I’m reading and creating constantly, and my mind retains so much information that it makes me both excruciatingly self-aware and painfully aloof at the same time. While both memories – the Killers concert and the trip to LA – are memories I’d consider to be good ones, I can’t help but fixate on a retelling of the events where all my awkward faults, real or imagined, are magnified and looped on repeat.
It’s incredibly self-absorbed, much like how we’re 660 words into this piece and it’s not even supposed to be about me. 🤷♂️But maybeI should celebrate the fact that I’m a socially awkward, clumsy person with Wikipedia for a brain.
After all, Beeson’s latest singles argue that our worst traits might actually be our best ones and that we should all love ourselves better.
“‘Gap Teeth’ explores the things that made it hard to be okay with myself,” Beeson says in the present day. “It isn't about self-love as much as it's about self-awareness and curiosity about the systems I've been part of my whole life.”
The song opens with a metaphor about a girl who picks from a tangelo tree. “I started writing it last summer when I was struggling a lot with my relationship with food,” she explains. “At the time, I was trying to think of the last time I ever felt neutral about eating, and I realized it was about age thirteen – right on the cusp of teenagehood.”
The chorus contains the poignant insight that despite awkward adolescence and orthodontic troubles, this young Jane Beeson “never looked so lovely.” She was happy then, swinging her legs over a tuscan floor in Arizona while idly picking citrus hybrids and eating them without a care in the world.
“As we get older, we begin to see things through a lens of morality and social pressure,” Beeson says. The social pressure bit hits home for me. “But when I was a kid, I would walk to the backyard and grab a fruit from a tree, eat half of it, and not think about it again. In the song I also talk about how my relationships with other systems like religion and family have affected me as I've gotten older. The tangelo metaphor is a not-so-subtle reference to the Tree of Life metaphor in Christian theology.”
Her upcoming album explores the themes from “Gap Teeth” in a lot of different ways. Beeson is fond of Arlo Parks and Mary Oliver – “Songwriters and poets who write in a very visceral and colorful way,” as she describes them.
“Songwriting is really important to me, but only in the sense that it's the form of expression I think I'm the most versed at. Everyone communicates with and understands the world differently, and my way of doing that happens to be through making songs. If I was suddenly cursed and had to stop writing, I'd probably start painting.”
She’s using sound as paint and words as her brush to get her by. “I'm really into religious allegories lately, which lends itself to some intense themes,” she says. “I'd say that the songs I'm making now are a bit more raw lyrically than things I've written in the past. This next batch of songs is coming from a very tender place thematically. I've been writing a lot about personal loss, religion, and what it's like to be a young adult right now.”
As a foil to the painful-but-optimistic “Gap Teeth,” Beeson’s second single from the new record explores what it’s like to watch someone self-sabotage in real time. “Swimmer” is a savage song. In fact, she once said she wasn’t sure if she’d ever release it. Severe in its honesty, it wrestles with how painful it is to love someone who hasn’t picked from the tangelo tree in a while – and whether or not it's your obligation “to take them back to [their own] Gap Teeth.”
This one is tragic, but I’d consider it “painful-but-empowering.” It ultimately arrives at the conclusion that you can’t eat someone’s tangelos for them. Plucking from the Tree of Life is a personal endeavor.
Beeson is artfully exploring her twenties – and all the painful growth that phase of life brings. She moved from Arizona to Utah for college. After finally finding friends and bandmates and settling into a new life there… college was over. “I've wanted to make music my career since I can remember,” she says about having to decide what to do after graduation. “I'm interested in and passionate about a lot of things and it was hard to let go of career options that would have made for a more stable life.”
She decided to move to Los Angeles to pursue music more fully. It’s been over ten months now. “The transition has been tough but so fun,” Beeson says. “I love my new friends and I miss my old ones. There is so much to be grateful for these days as I'm able to release more music and play fun shows. The jury is still out on whether I'll stay in California long term, but for now I think it's the best place for me to be.”
Right now, she’s focused on staying sane as she finishes the new record. She’s been traveling a ton and playing shows, and she dropped her third single from the record just yesterday. While the jury is still out on what Beeson fans should call themselves (Beeson once suggested “Best Case Buds” but I’m partial to “The Swim Team”), Beeson knows exactly what she’d tell her 13-year-old self.
To The Girl Who Picked From the Tangelo Tree: “You’re really kind and smart and pretty! And you can eat as many tangelos as you want.”
Make sure tofollow Beeson on Instagram and check out her brand new single, “Just For Now,” below!