windjamm | JENNY FROM THEBES STUDY: PART 2, Ground Level, Only One Way, Fresh Tattoo (Reply)

Ground Level, "There was, en route to greener pastures, a small house in the city"

This is another song that illustrates the lives people live in Jenny's house. This one is more focused on the realities of life here. It isn't glamorous or particularly restful. Yes, this is a place where outcasts can live their lives, but here in this Ranch-style safehouse beneath the cloverleaf interchange the world affords them very little else.

I think it's a fair expression of what these spaces feel like to twenty-somethings trying to find places away from home. It's shitty apartments, friends who haven't figured out who they want to be, and the inability to have a feeling of permanence. I think one thing this entire album has done for me is illustrated just how the safehouse refuses to be comfortable.

It's easy to glamorize and romanticize the past, but through the shifting viewpoints across all of the songs I've mentioned until now we get a panoramic of this place that doesn't allow room to hide. You can't push all the trash out of frame, you can't hide that sketchy friend in another room. However, I think like many of the things JD writes, by pursuing that genuine, authentic thing it allows the concept of glamor to transcend the superficially, aesthetically perfect and pull a sort of humanity from it all that is the mundane stuff of myth, the parts of the world that are true and real.

Only One Way, "They consider one another in the often harsh light of how the world is"

This is a fun song thematically. There's this overarching sense of foreboding, of prophecy but it's paired with the sense of inevitability.

You're going to get a wrinkle on your forehead

You're gonna get a click in your knee

You're gonna tell the doctor that you can't sleep

We discuss the truth of aging, the truth of life and the world. These things will come.

You're gonna make a bargain with the bad guys

You're gonna make some choices you regret

There's no place to hide from the prophecy

Since nobody told you it falls to me

And so too will the parts of life we aren't told about. Sometimes you make bad choices. This will happen.

You're gonna have to watch for the signs

You're gonna have to learn how to read

Nobody's gonna hand you a flashlight

You're gonna have to steal what you need

And the world may not give you what you need and so you'll have to provide for yourself. And if means aren't afforded to you, well, you'll still have to find a way, won't you?

There's something about this song that reminds me of the place in video games where you no longer have options available to you. You had them, once. You could have persuaded this character to help you, you could have stolen this item two hours ago, you could have done a lot of things. But all of those options are closed to you now. You failed the speech check. You missed the item. Now you have a fight and only a fight, maybe with characters you hoped you could win to your side, but not anymore.

Maybe that's just because I've been playing a lot of Divinity Original Sin 2 lately.

In any case, JD says of this song,

“I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. I work a job where a couple guys clap when I drink water. I want you to know, out there in civilian life, when you drink water, I’m on the bus applauding for you. It’s a solemn ritual, I say ‘Fellas, you gotta get out of your bunk. It’s time to clap for the people who are drinking water with nobody to clap for them.’ In an elliptical way, this song is kind of about that.

I think, as a monument to mundane, dogged survival it's a lovely piece.

I've been trying to work out whether or not the "one way" this mentions is germane to the album and the Greek Tragedy of it all. It certainly does ring to the tragedy, but I think that might just be thematic.

Fresh Tattoo, "She commemorates her present station on her forearm"

This is the song JD calls the flashpoint of the story. Everything else is setup, but this begins the actual journey of this self-described Rock Opera about Jenny.

In this song, Jenny gets a tattoo of the Seventh Shield, the one we discussed in Clean Slate on the previous post. The words in Greek surrounding it, "I will bring this man back and he will have his city and move freely in his father's halls." Months before the album released, when it wasn't clear how much of an album about Jenny this would be, some fans were debating whether she was supposed to be the woman on the album art or Justice from Seven from Thebes. This song is the album sealing that firmly in place. (I would posit that the album being called Jenny from Thebes gave it away, but perhaps not to all.)

Until this point we haven't heard a lot about Jenny on this particular album, despite her being the titular character. It's the moment in the musical where the main character comes into frame after the overture, after the ensemble songs. Where has Jenny been? Well, she's been here getting a tattoo that symbolizes returning lost people to their rightful lands.

We setup the album's plot, in thirty days she will be evicted from the safehouse. How novel to have an album with a plot.

And here, Jenny finds the narrator of Jenny I on the curb, strung out and helpless and she does what is in her nature. She takes them in and the song wraps a kind of knowing transitory nature to this entire encounter. Yes, it's a beginning, but it's a beginning inside of an ending.

All of this will disappear in the twinkling of an eye

But there is a sense that it will matter. This is a POV song from Jenny, so specifically, all of this will matter to her.

Well, you may forget the whys and wheres

Of an old tattoo on your forearm there

But usually you recall the day you got one

And usually it fades in the sun

But not this one

All of these things wrap together and form a kind of coherent first arc to all of this, first act if you will.

Jenny is the owner of a safehouse for outcasts. It is as safe as she can make it, but still vulnerable to the world, still a part of it despite everything and there's no greater evidence for this than the fact that her eviction is forthcoming. All of this will end and, judging by the portents, by the words of the oracles, this will all end quickly. But to those who survive it will matter terribly.