Lori Jean is a singer-songwriter and a student in the M.A. Depth Psychology and Creativity with Emphasis in the Arts and Humanities at Pacifica. She has just recorded and released seven songs about psyche. I’m delighted to hear about her creative process in this dynamic and unique program. Part I of II.
Angela Borda: Thank you so much for speaking with me today. First, let me say that I am really fussy about my standards for singer-songwriters, and I find your music and voice to be so beautiful and the lyrics and music to be well crafted. What are some of the formative moments in music or your life that brought you from your beginning in Fosston, Minnesota, to enrolling at an institute of depth psychology on the California coast?
Lori Jean: Well, I suppose it all started at the upright piano of the Lutheran church in the small iron-range town where I grew up. For my first piano recital I played Kiss the Girl from The Little Mermaid. My stage fright was crippling and I wept at the piano the entire time. After the initial terror of that first performance, however, I was hooked. It’s interesting that my first encounter with music was such a terror-inducing one because when I think about it now, I think whenever life is complicated, scary, or just plain awful, I tend to reach for my guitar or sit down at the piano to sort it out.
Angela: Was there something in particular you were searching for or hoping to happen when you enrolled in the HMC program? And what has changed in your creative expression in consequence?
Lori: What surprised me is that I went into the program with the attitude that this was a professional move for me. I wasn’t thinking of recording an album, I was thinking about expanding my private practice to include creativity. How silly of me to think I wouldn’t be writing music. For the program, you create things in conjunction with the papers you write. The first semester I wrote the song “Home,” with an accompanying paper on the archetype of Home being more than a physical place, but also an inner state. This came from Dr. Dylan Francisco’s class on “The Expressive Power of Archetypes.” I hadn’t recorded new music since before Covid, maybe 2018. And within the first semester at Pacifica, I was making arrangements to get in the studio and record this music that was pouring out of me. I learned quickly that if you go courting psyche, knowingly or not, the flood gates open! We don’t have the archetypes, the archetypes have us. You can be a vessel for creative practices, but you need to have reverence for a sense of mystery around how these forces show up in you. So my original intentions to bring this program back to my private practice turned into developing myself as an artist. I was the one who needed to heal, I wasn’t going to rush back to heal others. There was work to be done within myself first.
Angela: You’ve recently created several songs, written, produced and recorded by you, which you call “Psyche Songs,” about reimagined archetypal figures and symbols. What brought about the genesis of these songs? Was the process of creating them a psychological journey as well as a musical one?
Lori: Yes, since being in the program, I’ve written and released seven singles. I realized after about a year in the program that I needed to take a leave of absence to really tend to what the course material was doing in me. So I released one song a month while I was on leave. Each song process was different. Some of them stemmed directly from class assignments. Many start with journaling or poetry. And what has been developing in me most recently while at Pacifica is just writing as if I’m having a conversation with psyche, a sort of back-and-forth between ego and Self.
Often it is my fragile ego asking, “What’s going on?” and the chorus is Psyche reassuring me saying things like “You’re ain’t damaged, you’re just healing” (as in Letter To My Heart). All of my songs have taken on a wisdom figure, archetype, or higher power reassuring the incarnated version of me in Earth School. Sometimes it’s a lesson, sometimes it’s pointing to the gold already present, saying “Here is the lesson, the gold.” Every time, Psyche shows me something within myself that needs to be brought to awareness.
Angela: One of the songs on your album is “Sleepy Hollow.” It was one of my favorite stories as a child, and then Tim Burton’s movie absolutely grasped my imagination, in part because Ichabod Crane is described and played as a “scaredy-cat,” a sensitive, feeling person who would really rather not be dealing with flaming pumpkin heads chasing him through the woods at night. How is Ichabod an archetype, and can you describe the inspiration for the song?
Lori: I think of Ichabod as the everyday man. Here’s this guy who moves to this town and all he wants is to be a teacher. We have this tendency to glorify heroes in American, like in the Hero’s Journey or the Heroine’s Journey. But what about going to the grocery store, to work, brushing your teeth? Not every event feels like the Hero’s Journey. Ichabod is thrust into this situation that terrifies him. Ichabod didn’t want to deal with the headless horseman, but he’s forced into the unknown of the woods. Jung was quoted several times in interviews about this intersection of fate with the woods, or the call to adventure. Paraphrasing, he essential said, “When fate comes knocking, you can either get up and go willingly, or you can be dragged. But either way, you’re going!” Some people go the Ichabod Crane route and have to go kicking and screaming into the woods, and I’ve certainly had those experiences in life.
In my version of the Sleepy Hollow story, I wanted to write a song where Ichabod was a female protagonist “losing her head.” Everything about being a woman right now is about “keep it together, don’t be too emotional.” In the song, the person is singing to their lover who betrayed them, and she says, “I gave you my heart, and only one thing will do us part.” Which is death. So she takes the vow seriously. That was the arrangement, and yeah, maybe she’s losing her head a little but as the lyrics say, “ashes ashes, dust to dust, you gotta die, it’s only just.”
For those who would like to know more about the M.A. Depth Psychology and Creativity with Emphasis in the Arts and Humanities at Pacifica, visit us here.
As a folk singer-songwriter, Lori Jean stands out as a captivating storyteller, weaving melodic tales that resonate with anyone. Lori’s music transcends traditional boundaries, blending folk elements with a distinctive style that reads like pages torn from the chapters of her life. Her music explores the joys and challenges of universal themes like love, death, the transformative power of heartbreak, and planetary stardust. Lori’s journey as a storyteller extends beyond the stage and studio. She is gifted at asking the question “is this in service to the song?” when producing in the studio, which is why she so seamlessly moves between genres. With so many stories to tell, she fearlessly ventures into artistic endeavors like essay-writing, poetry, video storytelling, and parenting, where she explores many of the themes found in her music. All her artistic endeavors serve as companion pieces to her songs, offering fans an intimate glimpse into the inspiration behind her art. In a world where boundaries between artistic disciplines are increasingly blurred, Lori Jean stands at the intersection of it all as a transdisciplinarian, inviting audiences to embark on a multifaceted journey through her creative landscape. With her guitar in hand and stories to tell, Lori continues to enchant, leaving an indelible mark on any room where her voice is heard.
Angela Borda is a writer for Pacifica Graduate Institute, as well as the editor of the Santa Barbara Literary Journal. Her work has been published in Food & Home, Peregrine, Hurricanes & Swan Songs, Delirium Corridor, Still Arts Quarterly, Danse Macabre, and is forthcoming in The Tertiary Lodger and Running Wild Anthology of Stories, Vol. 5.
