Daughter of the late folk icon Harry Chapin, singer-songwriter Jen Chapin doesn’t entirely like the term “singer-songwriter.”
"It’s a weird term,” says Chapin, who brings her band to the Winchester tomorrow night. “As a genre, it’s not that appealing to me. Narcissism is too strong a word but the connotation is about telling you my feelings through a guitar. I have a wider musical perspective. I came of age with the first hip-hop tracks were on the radio.”
Chapin’s new album, Reckoning, certainly crosses into a variety of genres. Some of it is rock. Some is pop. And some is jazz. It reflects Chapin’s musical upbringing.
“I walked on the beach with my boombox playing Houses of the Holy,” she says when asked about her formative years. “All those things are part of me: classic rock and soul music. That is as much part of the music as singer-songwriters. I love Joni Mitchell but I’m trying to throw other things in the mix too. Different people hear different things. Some people really hear the jazz. Some people really hear the folk. Some people hear Janis Joplin or Alanis Morissette. Some people hear it as really relaxing and some people hear it as really dark. I appreciate that.”
Expect to hear most (if not all) of Reckoning at tomorrow’s show.
“When I was putting the song order together for the album, it happened that that song order [of Reckoning] works well in a live set,” she says. All of the songs are really meaningful to me right now and work as a live performance. We have been playing all of the songs and we include two or three songs from my other recordings or maybe a cover tune. We get really powerful reactions to our live shows. It’s great.”
