Jane Doe on singing quietly

Before her residency, we sat at table nine and talked about microphones, old ballads and the last set.

Jane arrives at four, before the bar opens, and walks the room once with her hand on the brick. "It tells you how loud you’re allowed to be," she says. "This one says: not very."

She learned to sing in a flat above a launderette, where the dryers covered everything below a certain volume. "So I sang underneath them. That’s still where I live, just under the noise."

Her new record, Low Lamps, was cut in this room over two nights. She left the clink of glasses in. "That’s the audience. You can’t mix them out."

“It tells you how loud you’re allowed to be. This one says: not very.”

LINER NOTES BY THE BLUE HOUR STAFF · PHOTOGRAPHY: HOUSE ARCHIVE · PRESSED AT 12 EXAMPLE STREET