Keepsake of the Week: “In Circles Now” by Jasmine Jang

“In Circles Now” is the latest EP from singer/songwriter and Keepsake House co-founder Jasmine Jang and is this week’s #KOTW.

In this semi-weekly blog series, we post our favorite new or re-discovered releases in independent music, our Keepsake of the Week, or #KOTW.

Asymmetric shapes become a kaleidoscope when they don’t fit perfectly into the puzzle that Jasmine Jang is trying to solve in her latest album, “In Circles Now.” This is the first record to be released under Jasmine’s real name, so it makes sense that the record itself feels the most real of her entire discography. If “In Betweens” was an ode to imagination and limitless dreams, “In Circles Now” is the exploration of what stays trapped in the mind. “Mosaic mind / spent time making sense of your charm,” Jasmine sings on the final track. It’s a record that is built as a concept album, a deep dive into one definitive chapter of Jasmine’s life, a little island in her brain that she carved out to examine all its pieces.

Its opening track, “Flowers Bloom Upside Down,” is the record’s most optimistic, with a hint of Jasmine’s signature imagination. “For nothing’s set in stone / We still have room to roam / In fields of wild thorns,” she sings after the song is opened by drums, a confident choice that grounds wandering lyrics. Still, there is a sense of acceptance here that nothing is set in stone and that people don’t always make sense, as illustrated in the line, “No safe and sound will amount / To a life of unexpectedness.” This acceptance flows throughout the EP as Jasmine digs ever deeper into a problem she knows she cannot solve.

The puzzle is a visual that lingers but is never spoken on the EP, which is filled with strong visual metaphors that all overlap: the upside-down flowers are made up of fractals, which are a type of mosaic and are represented in patterns like eyelines (“Crow’s Feet”) or the round and round of a solo drive (“Highway Island”), a feeling of running in circles that all meet the same end. “Highway Island” contains the album’s title (“It’s safe in hiding / But we’re in circles now”) and also feels like its heart. While Jasmine has always loved a metaphor, she is not hiding behind them now, but rather picking them apart.

The production on “Highway Island” is a standout. It starts and ends with the recording of a tape machine that evokes the sound of rain on a windshield as Jasmine sings about the freedom that “lives in that space between the pavement and a driver’s seat.” Producer Harper James plays with synth effects and a Casio keyboard that blows the pre-chorus straight into the chorus. Instruments pause on every “stop” lyric and Jasmine’s falsetto in every chorus melts like rain running down the road. 

The song opens with one of my favorite lines Jasmine has ever written, the opening verse that goes, “If the night could speak / It’d tell you to ache endlessly / And if I’m like you / I’d let it.” The song is an astoundingly honest admission of Jasmine’s penchant for melancholy and her resistance to inheriting a parent’s negative qualities (“I’m not small anymore / But I still take after you”). At the same time, it is a recognition of feelings that can’t be understood (“I’m not mad anymore / But I know you’re still in pain”) and an allowance of herself to let go. I recently discovered the music of Boston songwriter Hayley Sabella, whose song “Flew the Nest” reminds me of “Highway Island.” Both work difficult emotions into facts of nature and prove that hope is hard work.

Hope also breeds questions in “Fractals,” which feels like it is in direct conversation with every other song on the album. The wandering and wondering brings us back to “Flowers Bloom Upside Down.” The miles on the road and highway map are a nod to “Highway Island.” The unspoken fragments and broken shapes foreshadow “Mosaic Mind,” and the last verse about a “vacant past” flows straight into the opening line (“Can't call back where I left you last / Are you stuck in the past?”) of “Crow’s Feet.” All of the pieces on this album swim around in circles until they make a whole, and here they meet in the middle, in exhibition of the record’s central theme: that “There’s beauty in these broken designs / Now I know there’s nothing to be fixed.”

My personal favorite song on the record is still “Crow’s Feet,” which is also my favorite to hear Jasmine play live. Memorably, it had both me and Sarah Kang in tears a couple months ago, and consider that your warning for Jasmine’s upcoming EP release show. The song was written after Jasmine’s grandmother turned 90 years old and feels reminiscent of another grandmother song, Madison Cunningham’s “Life According to Raechel.” “Crow’s Feet” is a ballad that anticipates loss and longs for more time, and while the guitar shines in its imperfect slides, the piano also makes its entrance onto the album here, pulling on all our heartstrings through the chorus. Keys continue into the bridge that returns to the record’s theme in its question, “Can I trust this mind to count the hours I spent here with you?”

The theme becomes as literal as Jasmine’s writing may ever be in the final track of the record, “Mosaic Mind.” The chords are lighter, dreamier, and more uplifting here than they have been since “Flowers Bloom Upside Down,” and drums come in midway to lift (reminiscent of her last album’s “Mulberry”) so that the track truly becomes a love song for what has felt like an enemy, Jasmine’s own head. “Brokenness mistaken for beauty” becomes “Beauty mistaken for brokenness,” and a mess unravels into something capable of change.

Jasmine Jang may be in circles now, but she has broken outside her own head. She’s finding beauty in the brokenness and connections in her course, like the reference to her early song “Strawberry Mountain” that is dropped at the end of this record’s first song: “Maybe we don’t know / How far we’ll go into our dreams / But all I know, my love / Is we’ll build a hill of strawberries.” Maybe none of it ever really makes sense. Maybe in the end, flowers will bloom upside down. Maybe that’s what makes life so beautiful, and what makes the mind of Jasmine Jang so magical: that it’s a puzzle none of us can solve and a story that will never get old.

Buy “In Circles Now” on Bandcamp now, support Jasmine Jang on Patreon, and see herperform the EP live with a band at Rockwood Music Hall on Sunday, November 6.

Jasmine Jang. Photo by Jeff Deng.