Jenn Grant

Jenn Grant believes in, while writing a song, the power of intuition; that she can feel something in the air and has to catch it. This skin-tingling, goosebump-inducing sense shaped her newest record, Love, Inevitable. The peculiar and enthralling magical quality of the Halifax folk-pop singer’s songwriting and performance persists all around Love, Inevitable. Power pop vocals on “Raven,” graceful, smooth synths on “Arizona,” and swelling, moving chords on “Lay Me Down.”

Love, Inevitable is a marker for a period of change in Grant’s life; of moving through one moment and leaving it behind, almost carefree, for another. “It came from this strange time in my life where I was sort of taking a leap of faith in several ways,” Grant says. “Taking all of these emotional risks and writing from a place of just trying to keep moving, I guess, too, in life, without being shut down by fear.”.”I just let everything go in order to make this record.”

Grant would be going through a massive period of personal change during the time after her last record, Paradise, specifically because of her pregnancy. It was many years of personal struggle, amidst touring and making records before she could create the family she had always wanted.

Love, Inevitable is and isn’t about motherhood. A direct conversation of motherhood is omitted and instead we’re left with an impression of this process; Grant’s energy imprinted on the tracks are tender, free, and, eventually, full. Songs like “Favourite Daughter” and “Magic and Mistakes” were particularly important to her because they sort of appeared and she caught them, harnessing a special power rooted in what was growing in her. “Some of the guitar songs I wrote in this little window of a few days where I felt this kind of energy around me. I didn’t know I was pregnant yet and those were when those songs were written. Those songs are special to me.”

Grant wrote the tracks in her living room in Halifax, turning to a Roland keyboard, experimenting with different tunings on her acoustic guitar and a banjo. She then flew to Portland, Oregon in July 2018 to record at Martine’s Flora Recording and Playback, a place that was actually coming to its end. An important part of how Love, Inevitable took the shape it did is due to the environment it was recorded in, spending the summer in the lush greenery of Portland in the middle of her pregnancy.