Slowing Down With Jana Horn

Going Up is a profile series featuring artists we love who are on the verge of breaking through.

As I walk the long, semi-industrial blocks of Prospect Heights, Brooklyn towards Tom’s Diner, where I’m due to meet Jana Horn for a late breakfast, I have her voice stuck in my head. Not the whispery-soft singing voice of her music, but her written voice. “I drifted through the city in pajamas, at midday,” Horn wrote in her artist bio, describing her early days in New York City. “I wasn’t the only one. I saw real people painting (with paintbrushes) murals advertising iPhones, finding it funny to hump barstools, looking everywhere for their stolen cars, as though they had only been hiding. There’s a city marshal who once had a car towed with a child inside.” Even in the ceaseless gray of that January morning, Horn’s portrait rings true: Each block is its own microcosm of cops and construction workers, daytime drifters and shitting dogs, all existing in their own little bubbles.

New York teaches you the art of discreet observation, but it can numb you in the process. I get the sense Horn’s spirit was numbed before she arrived here in late 2023, though. It’s hiding in plain sight in her bio, where she mentions that her mother “was learning to live again after years of being passed from one hospital to the next, like a crime no one wanted to be responsible for.” Her visceral phrasing intrigued me, both as a writer and as a fellow member of the sick mom club, and I heard echoes of my own experiences in the fragmented grief of her recent music. In “Come On,” a highlight from her self-titled third LP, Horn wades through the emotional baggage of remembering the hospital waiting rooms, pills, and prayers with a free-associative list set to slowcore. But you don’t just show up to breakfast with a stranger and stick your finger directly in the mother wound over pancakes and eggs. That kind of talk is for the cigarette afterwards.