Jennifer Terran’s highly personal, inventive music and achingly beautiful voice has inspired rave responses from music lovers and publications all over the world (Telerama, Uncut, Rolling Stone, Oor etc.) making several top 10 lists, including second best album of the year in The Times (London). Her fifth and latest recosrding, Full Moon in 3 is a mighty accomplishment created over a three year period. It is an epic journey into the realm of nature, magic, sexuality and outer space- a witchy soulful uncovering of the soul. The record is graced by some amazing talents including bassist Todd Sickafoose (Ani DiFr anco); mixed by multiple Grammy award winner, Husky Hoskulds, (Tom Waits, Norah Jones, Fiona Apple…) and produced by Jennifer Terran with loving assistance by David Simon-Baker.
Soon after the move, Jennifer’s mother started getting ill. Jennifer and her sister who had always carried adult responsibilities, cared for her baby siblings while her mom and stepfather visited natural health clinics. Five months later with Jennifer just turning 13, her mother died at age 41. She was diagnosed with Lukemia though there are arguments that her sickness was due to other causes. Upon the death of her mother, Jennife r moved back to Los Angeles to live with her father. From there it was more recording with the big producer guy and his cheesy songs, school talent shows and the Hollywood nightclub showcase and audition scene. It was also at this time when Jennifer started acting, though she was not very good at it. At 15 Jennifer left her religion. The first in her family “to see the light”, over the years the rest would follow. By this time piano had taken on a more loose, self developed approach with slower tempos being her favorite. By the time she was 17, she was craving to feel some normalicy and wished to take a break from the identity she had built around music. She went to University of California Santa Barbara and earned a high honors bachelor degree in Sociology during which time she began her love affair with long distance running. Jennifer ran 7 marathons placing 3rd in her age group in her last LA marathon race. With her boyfriend at the time she started several entrepreneur projects during college and continued teaching aerobics and soon began dancing hip hop which she still teaches. Through college Jennifer had many intense withdrawls from being away from music, but didn’t want to do back into it half way. So finally the day after her college graduation, Jennifer began writing music fo r the first time.
Jennifer treated ‘The Musician’ with the utmost secrecy, never sharing it with anyone but the musicians recording in her room. “I didn’t want anyone’s praise or criticism getting in the way of what was proving to be a very pure, authentic experience. The only thing that mattered was getting the music and the mixes to feel right to me. There’s always this notion that you should get peoples feedback on what you are recording or writing and I had come to the point where I felt this to be totally irrelevant to what I was after. This was the whole point of the record as a concept album as well... to follow the still inner voice. And somewhere in the back of my head, I knew that if the music was moving me, I wouldn’t be the only one. It was a very happy time in my creative life… one that didn’t involve other ears.”, recalls Jennifer. ‘The Musician’ was completed in late 2000 and she toured here and there on the west coast for about a year until a well respected music publication in the Netherlands discovered it with the music editor quoting, “I’d rather trade in all my Tori Amos CD’s for Jennifer Terran’s “The Musician”. Soon after Jennifer and Brendan Statom, her partner on double bass began touring in Europe. One year later, the Rounder label licensed the album from Jennifer’s indie label, Grizleda Records. The sel f made indie album received great praise making many critics best of lists, “2nd Best Album of the year” in THE TIMES (London) and 4 stars in Rolling Stone. Several tours followed with sold out concerts across Europe. FULL MOON in 3
Some Jen thoughts on Full Moon in 3… If this music could look like something, then it would be what you see from Camino Cielo, the high ridge above Santa Barbara, where there are no cars or houses. On one side, you can see down to the ocean with the islands and our small city with its bittersweet human drama. Being at a distance from it and surrounded by nature, you ga in perspective on the pretense we have as people. In nature, there is no pretense. It’s all accepting. On the other side of the ridge, you see the back country… bi g, glorious California mountains… looking just how they looked hundreds, maybe thousands of years ago. It would be dusk and the moon would be rising and the sun setting. This is a small snapshot of what the spirit and the power of ‘Full Moon in 3’’ captures for me” . Jennifer did one brief tour for Full Moon in 3 in 2007 with sold out shows across Europe. (Click here to see her live in Amsterdam on national television/ link at my myspace page). Her next record is in the process of being recorded. To be updated on it's progress, other news and concerts please hit the high "A" note on the above piano to sign up for her very occasional newsletters . "She speaks of the unspeakable, with great touch and skill in production, the arrangements and the songs. Jennifer Terran did show her nakedness on the beautiful pictures of The Musician, on Full Moon In 3 she is naked in the head of the listener. In my mind I give her a kiss." 5 STARS for 'FULL MOON IN 3' "Not everybody can be both scary and vulnerable; Jennifer Terran (pronounced tearin') can. The scary part is her voice, which spirals into regions so high you fear sh
e'll disappear or crash, and lately it has acquired a diamond-dust edge that can saw through a stack of hearts, first of all her own." "Endowed with a voice or heartbreaking purity and melodic talent, Jennifer Terran will most likely rise rapidly to the level of the greats." "Breathtaking... timeless... pure... monumental.... Categorizing Jennifer Terran is impossible. Terran is a style of her own." "ALL OF you wondering whether Kate Bush is going to release another album, or if Tori Amos will ever make another record as good as her debut, can stop bothering with such side issues. Here's the album you'v e been waiting for.... I don't think there's a duff track. Her voice is staggering. And you've got to love someone who can yell out a full-on, Springsteenesque '1-2-3-4!' to announ ce the arrival of a violin." " * * * * " "Haunting and intense, she sounds like a rawer version of Tori Amos. But Terran possesses a uniquely fierce and uncommon uncompromising voice" "Terran is a breathtaking singer. Her vocal innuendos are pure, free of the mannerism of a lot of contemporary female colleagues." "Jennifer Terran is an unusual, very unusual kind of artist and quite a woman! A truly magnificent Film Noire Diva and a world-class songwriter-singer. This woman is unique, captivating vocalist, pianist, tenderly rebellious songwriter, producer by raison d'etre and necessity, hip-hop dynamic instructor and dancer, story-teller, an existentialist philosopher, an emotionally and intellectually charged teaser and provocative presence and most certainly a daring-devil entrepreneur." "I'd gladly trade in all my Tori Amos CDs for Jennifer Terran's 'The Musician'...a magnificant album." ***** (five stars and #1 BEST POP ALBUM of 2001 "The Musician is Terran's third album, but strangely enough it has the innocence of a debut. The compositions are fluent and playful, both rough and soft. Terran pr
oduced and mixed everything herself, but has succeeded in preventing that the spontaneity of her music was killed by perfectionism... A t some point Tori Amos had that same gift, but in the meantime she has become a phenomena? Let's hope that Jennifer Terran will never become world famous." "Terran is extraordinary USA singer/songwriter and THE MUSICIAN places her firmly in the top echelon of her craft. This is remarkable pop music, and one o f 2002's few essential albums" "If Jennifer Terran has a voice as much incomparable as unforgettable, it is because she is also that in real life. Her authentic and sensual voice awakes up in us emotions so deep inside that thinking of it makes nearly crying of pain or joy, as if truth had a price." "Pure, that was this concert in one word. No setlist, no décor, only a small lady, with a voice like a storm behind the piano" "The music of Jennifer Terran is so beautiful it hurts." "Tori Amos and Ani DiFranco combined couldn't take on Terran
's integrity." "Jennifer Terran is a stand out diva!" "Cruel is a resolutely compelling album of rare grace and uncompromising passion." "...sounds a lot like, well, Jennifer Terran. Grade A." "Terran is remarkable...equal to that of a young Joni Mitchell." "Terran's vocal ability is staggering. Her songs are beautiful." "Captivating...powerful voice and songwriting" "Often compared with Tori Amos, in my regard, Terran is a singer/songwriter of a higher caliber. "That's the thing with transcendentalism, it hardly lives up to its name unless it carries you away. Well Jennifer, it did carry some of us away. We just left our bodies back there on the Plaza Theatre chair." "Listening to Cruel was an orgasmic auditory experience. Sometimes Terran sounds like a spiritual pop-folk goddess, and at other moment she comes off like a wide-eyed town freak ....it always sounds beautiful. You've gotta listen to understand." "a gifted singer" "If Amos and Cole can be a hit, this certainly can as well." "Jennifer Terran's musical ability seems virtually limitless?. The album successfully captures the ab solute originality of Jennifer Terran." |
Jennifer Terran was born in Los Angeles, growing up in the 70’s on a dead end street in North Hollywood suberbia. She was the youngest of five children and raised Mormon though she would leave her religion at 15. Her mother Adele Kathryn was an intense, passionate woman, an artist, a dancer and a singer. Jennifers’ parents met at a nightclub- her mom singing in a very tight, sexy sequened dress, her father Tony Terran in the band.Her father, a full Sicilian, was born in Buffalo, New York and began playing trumpet in his early teens. He got stuck in Los Angeles when the leader of his touring big band refused to pay for his 
return fair to New York. So he had no choice but to stay in LA where at 18 (and with a full head of
hair at the time), he landed being one of the band members in the “I love Lucy Show”. This began his successful career as a studio player playing on over 10,000 records, T.V. sessions and motion pictures playing with nearly every influencial musician and band on the planet including the Beatles, Frank Zappa and Ella Fitzerald. He was almost always the loudest instrument in the mix. 
Jennifer, a Leo, did her first featured home concert in her livingroom when she was about 4. Soon after she performed in several musical theatre productions. She was 5 when she started her first entrepenuer business selling “back scratches” to her family members for five cents.A favorite pastime was singing songs from the 70’s pop song books while her oldest sister April accompanied her on piano. The family broke up with a divorce when Jennifer was 8 and thus began her many moves with her mother, older sister Eve and stepfather. At 8, she decided she wanted to learn to play piano so she could accompany herself singing. She began typical beginning classical piano lessons at age 9 which went on for 2 or 3 years. Though she lacked the desire to conform to her classical teacher’s lessons, she was greatly moved by music and by singing in particular. Jennifer got her first big rush of being on stage when at age 9, she performed
in the school talent show singing a song from “The Muppet Show” which brought her best friend to tears. It was from this moment, that she began to embrace the idea of making music as her life dream. 
At 12 Jennifer was discovered by a record producer who was convinced he would make her into the next big kid star. She worked in his studio non stop recording old cheesy pop songs. The producer would sit in the control room crying from the raw charge and emotion in her pre-pubesent voice. The flow of the project was interrupted by her mom’s decision to move once again to a small town in Utah. She went from a concrete, smog filled Los Angeles existence, tagging along with dad to recording sessions to the smells and sights of hay, families with 13 children and Mormon churches on every street corner. 
The first songs that came out were very personal. They were also very developed musically though she was ignorant of 
music theory. She wrote many, many songs in her first year of writing and for all intensive purposes taught herself piano, developing her own beautiful strange way with harmony and dissonance. She had several bands, including “Puppet Show” and “Grizelda” while at the same time starting to play solo piano/voice concerts in a local café. Several demos later, she began making her debut 
Jennifer started recording again right away releasing one year later her very playful and quirky elaborate EP,
The live album features songs from her prior albums, as well as a few unrelased ones but also for the first time renditions of other peoples’ work, including Cohen’s 'Halleluja', 'Streets of Loredo' and 'Que Sera'. 
It was during these 3 years that she was conceiving and recording Full Moon in 3, another ambitious concept album which stretched her in many new and exciting dimensions. Haunting, achingly beautiful, sometimes psychadelic, “full moon in 3’ was unraveling as a deep universe with Jennifer’s gorgeous string and mellotron arrangements as well as a surprise moment of almost hiphop as she raps nakedly about a sexual 3 experience.