Music Projects
Songs. Stories. Soot.
Lori Jean doesn’t just write songs—she collects them like bones, like old letters, like the soot left behind from burning pages torn out of her own journals.
Her music doesn’t fit neatly into genres (and she’s not trying to).
Rooted in folk, tangled with poetry, her songs sound like pages pulled from the underbelly of a life fully lived—love, grief, heartbreak, soul longing, and the terrible ache of being human.
She’s the kind of artist who asks, “Is this in service to the muse?”
Not, “Will this chart?”
That’s why her music shapeshifts—from stripped-down folk ballads to haunting soundscapes that refuse to stay in their lane.
But the songs don’t stop at the guitar.
Lori’s storytelling spills into essays, poetry, video, and even gardening—each piece a companion, a ghost, a thread leading deeper into the labyrinth of her creativity, and her life as she lives it daily.
Her work isn’t just a catalog. It’s a landscape.
A place to wander, to linger, to get lost.
In a world obsessed with branding and tidy categories, Lori Jean is busy blurring the lines, blurring the paint, blurring the edges between song and story, art and life.
With her guitar in hand and soot on her boots, she invites you in.
Not to be entertained.
To feel something.
To remember something.
To leave marked.
“Letter To My Heart”
This song is a conversation between ego, and soul. The anxious, terrified heart beseeching soul for guidance, and soul reassuring it that everything has always been all right. It is the archetypal journey of letting go during life’s thresholds and trusting that everything is guided, nothing is pointless, trust the process, not the feeling, you ain’t damaged, you’re just healing. The culmination of the song being that in the symbolic “death” of life’s tragedies there is always the promise of better things to come.
“Home”
This song reconsiders the archetype of “Home” through the lens of wandering from place to place looking for friends, relationships, or peace, but finding no contentment. It isn’t until soul reminds there’s nowhere to go, you’re home. That we find that “Home” isn’t a place, but a state to be found within one’s inner self.
“Alive”
In the early month’s of the COVID pandemic while quarantined from my family, I received the news that a dear friend had passed away. “Alive” is a reggae song, inspired by his freewheeling spirit attempting to capture the reality that time flies and we never know how many days we will enjoy with those we love.
The grieving process is very individual. And multiple people affected by the death of the same person can be in very different places at different times. I wanted to write a song that touched on each of the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and eventually acceptance. “Gone” reassures the listener that even when others seem to need us to act or think a certain way, it’s OK to feel like someone shouldn’t be gone, for any amount of time.