By Megan Gieske, Staff Writer
Jessica Lamb performed an acoustic set in the Student Center on Nov. 2 at 8 p.m. after an opening by senior Austin Howard.
“Everything I call home I just left behind.” “Wave goodbye to all I knew.” “The open road just doesn’t make me feel as at home as it used to.”
“I wrote all those songs while I was traveling,” said Lamb. “It’s an important part of how I started writing music. I was scared of writing music, and I was also in a rough place in life, and [traveling] just really changed me and my life and gave me a lot of courage and bravery.”
Like Lamb, college students on campuses like Asbury’s might also name travel as one of the themes for their life, along with the theme of home.
Lamb describes the travel theme of her EP as not just a theme for her music but for her life. She will be moving to Nashville, Tenn. this January, and has been traveling most all of her life from her home in Birmingham, Ala. After graduating in May from Lee University, a small university not unlike Asbury, Lamb has been traveling as a full-time musician.
In one song, “Call Us Home,” about returning in-between her travels, Lamb sings “You would think that in a town this small there wouldn’t be anything to find.” But for Lamb, who first played a song she had written at a Cambridge coffee shop during a semester abroad, permanence also plays an important theme in her music, one of home.
Describing coming home in the same song, Lamb sings, “Across the ocean on a plane ride with twenty strangers’ heart beats,” and at the end of the song, “Across the ocean on a plane ride with twenty friends’ heart beats.”
Warm and welcoming, Lamb’s music bears the message that through the wind and rain, every day will be better than the one behind.
Singer and guitar player, Austin Howard of Lancaster, Ohio, described Lamb as a good writer of simple songs but good melodies. “With a lot of music, you don’t see good melodies,” said Howard.
Anyone at Starbucks locations in the U.S. during November will hear those good melodies Howard described, as Starbucks picked up Lamb’s latest two songs, “Let Me Be and Cambridge.” On Nov. 1, Lamb pretended to work at one of Starbucks Birmingham, Ala. locations just to hear one of her songs played at the coffee shop. When after two hours one of her songs came on, Lamb admitted, “I was screaming, and signing along to my own songs.”
Lamb, also a finalist in Aloft Hotel’s annular Project: Aloft Star competition, won a mentoring session with Ingrid Michaelson, one of her favorite music artists, and the chance to open for Michaelson in New York City, during October.
Lamb’s second music video, a music video for Lamb’s song, “Let Me Be,” will be released Nov. 6. Although Lamb filmed the music video in San Bernardino Mountains this past summer, she said, “[It] reminds me of fall and those feelings of slow but really warm sounds.”
Warm and welcoming, Lamb’s music bears the message that through the wind and rain, every day will be better than the one behind.
Follow Jessica Lamb on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @JessicaLamb for information on her upcoming CD release, or purchase her EP, stickers or t-shirts now at jessicalambmusic.com.
