Much about Jordan Patterson’s music seems to follow a logical path. Listening to her songs, you likely wouldn’t be surprised to learn she was born in North Carolina and raised on Roberta Flack, or that she then traveled west to study at the L.A. County High School for the Arts (alumni: Phoebe Bridgers, Haim, and Sasami) and soon after discovered Nick Drake, Radiohead, and Ableton. Her warm, hand-held but slightly unsettled music is constitutive of all her influences.
What can’t be accounted for, however, is that voice, which seems to exist entirely outside any lineage or explanation. Her singing almost seems to propose a new paradigm: What if all of the stress were emphasized in the backend? What if the human lung were capable of taking its largest breath just as it reaches emptiness? Cameron Winter, naturally, is a fan.
The Hermit, Patterson’s debut album, is around 70 percent vibrato. And it works. The technique becomes its own rhythm, a mechanism for pacing and release. She leans into her songs’ most pliant vowels, sidestepping the self-conscious affect that so often accompanies “cursive” singing, that goyidd-awful vowel drift pioneered by female indie singer-songwriters and popularized by post-Tumblr stars like Halsey in the mid-2010s. Instead, Patterson turns vocal inflection into a kind of pulse; her style might best be described as post-cursive singing.
Were it not for her voice, Patterson’s music could well drift into the background of a Starbucks playlist; it’s that ragged vibrato that makes the tall white chocolate mocha with whipped cream spill. The harmonies of her guitar are all quite straightforward. She works within a reverent folk framework, and plays it fairly straight: primary color chords, strings that build perfectly in place at the pre-choruses, and uncomplicated lyrics like “right person, wrong time.” Yet she cuts into that simplicity with her singular voice as well as occasional flashes of unconventional production, which reveal Patterson’s curiosity for how sound can reshape sincerity. The result is a distinctively expressive style.
The kettle-whistling violin on “Stranger” and the laser-gun sounds that punctuate “Jim” are among the album’s most successful balances of the simple and the strange. Elsewhere, Patterson wrestles with the familiar and unfamiliar with less than fully formed expertise. On “God,” for example, the mix of clanging metal, dry percussive hits, and floaty vocals occasionally tips into the operose and cluttered. Her strategy of disguising simplicity with unconventional production is reminiscent of Laura Veirs’ early work: inventive flourishes that elevate straightforward song structures and distinguish the artist from the typical singer-songwriter archetype. In most cases, Patterson accomplishes this in a winningly idiosyncratic way.
So many flashes of brilliance emerge from Patterson’s pick-up-and-play immediacy. One can easily imagine her in her bedroom, improvising “I Can See the Mountains From Here,” surprised by the thoughts that surface with each start-stop of the guitar. There’s an unguarded honesty to the way her insecurities are woven into the music: “What am I doing?” she asks on “Right Person, Wrong Time,” “Is it special? Is it right?”
Patterson is an artist still working in the unmediated rush of thought and inspiration. That absence of control isn’t exactly a flaw here; it’s the record’s form. The Hermit is the product of appetite, rather of mastery. Patterson’s imagination runs ahead of the craft, but that gap is where the excitement lives. This is someone not yet willing to domesticate their own excitable sensibility, who wants to keep playing and delaying the end of the song forever. “There is no end to this song,” she sings on “Jim,” her voice quavering as though it could never run out of breath.
