Jay Power
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Jay Power

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Until recently, Adelaide’s Jay Power conducted her musical exploits under her legal name, Jayne-Anne Power. Using this moniker, she released three LPs of hip-shaking soul music. However, prior to Power’s brand new release, The Missing, she decided an adjustment was needed.

“I have changed as a person over the years and I felt like I wanted something simpler, more direct and a bit more androgynous,” Power says. “Jayne-Anne is rather feminine and I’m not a girly girl at all. I’m certainly not butch, but I’m not a flowery sort of person. The other side of it was practical – to make it easier for people to find me in the digital world.”

Early last year, those who’d been following Power’s movements for the past decade were left wondering where on earth she’d gone. Power admits there was a time when the project’s subsistence was in doubt. “I was really in the wilderness music-wise,” she says. “I parted ways with a couple of my band members I’d worked with for a long time, so I was feeling a little lost. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, I didn’t know who I wanted to work with and I actually gave it all up for about six months.”

However, things turned around when Power was introduced to musicians and production duo Paul and John Bartlett. “They used to play for a soul band named Lowrider, who made some really beautiful recordings that I really liked,” she says. “We had a lot of musical taste in common. Also, a lot of the gaps that I felt I had, in terms of what I thought I could produce, they could fill. So it just sort of worked out and we went for it. They liked the songs, they liked the rhythms and they went to town on it.”

This led to a no-holds-barred recording stint in mid-2014, followed by a snazzy mixing and mastering job, which was enabled by a successful Pozible campaign. The Missing is now upon us – a sleek, sexy introduction to the artist known as Jay Power. Emboldened by her tweaked identity, Power eradicated all external worries during the writing and recording process and purely looked at satisfying own desires.

“If you’re not thinking about the outcomes and you’re thinking about what you’re making, you go back into your own soul and listen to yourself,” she says. “It took me back to being an artist, rather than being a business person. I had fallen into the trap over the years of doing things I thought audiences wanted to hear, writing songs I thought would help get me gigs – all of that. For this album, I just thought, ‘What do you really want to do?’ and it reminded me that I have the freedom to make any art I want to make, any way I want to make it.

“It’s about knowing yourself and taking the risk to give what you’ve got to give, regardless of how it’s received,” she adds. “That’s the most powerful stuff. It makes you feel vulnerable, but that’s what you have to do to be an artist, in my view.”

BY AUGUSTUS WELBY