Jean Ryden roams a realm of grief on her debut LP Parallel Universe. Across eight sobering and mesmeric songs, the songwriter/producer entombs herself within the persistent pain of isolation and loss. Wrenching from her broken heart the shards of sorrow lodged there by the death of her parents.
The album opens with “Bittersweet,” an eerie lullaby in which Ryden entangles herself in a web of grim strings, confronting life’s tenuousness with somber acceptance. “Maybe I’m too close / To see the grand design,” she reasons. “Maybe we’ll meet again / But in another —” her words cut short as if unable to penetrate that vaporous but impassable veil between life and death.
“Parallel Universe” finds her wandering through dreams of her life before the loss of her parents, occupying a now unattainable dimension that she fills with the cinematic and emotional breadth of her anguish. Then there’s “Lincoln Tunnel,” where a pervading sense of solitude takes the incongruent shape of social lonerism.
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Ryden’s lyricism is nowhere more affecting than when she’s conjuring memories of a time before personal tragedy. “Tired of Goodbye” is perhaps the album’s most harrowingly beautiful — a slowly strummed lament that leads you through the sensory impressions left behind by her father and mother — ones she desperately clings to.
Perhaps the most devastating aspect of Parallel Universe is the honesty with which Ryden mingles tender hope with eviscerating misery. Few songs communicate that sweet agony better than its penultimate track, “Taste of Heaven” — “Like rewatching a movie / You see the mistakes,” she coos alongside a mournful piano. “But either way, you can’t rewrite the end.”
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Yet as the melody starts to swell with strings and stirring drums — keys now twinkling urgently — she acknowledges the brief but far from meager love she was lucky enough to experience. “It was bittersweet / I see you in my reflection,” she sighs. “Guess that’s better than nothing.”
Words: Steven Ward
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Listen to Parallel Universe the new album from Jean Ryden below!
