Courtney Jaye
Hymns and Hallelucinations 
Tropicali Records
Friday, May 20, 2022

“This is spiritual music for weirdos.”

That’s how Courtney Jaye sums up her latest album, Hymns & Hallelucinations. And there couldn’t be a more apt description.

Don’t be confused, this isn’t a “religious” album, per se. But skimming the tracklisting, you could be forgiven for thinking as much. “Let There Be Light,” “The Kingdom Is Inside Me,” “Take It Up With The Lord.” What is this, some New Age version of Born-Again Bob Dylan?

But these songs are less about religion — or at least the fundamentalist definition of religion, with its absolutes and unflinching certainties — than it is the search for God, whatever that means to you.

Jaye began her journey years earlier, when she was just a young Jewish girl who wasn’t interested in religion and didn’t want a bat mitzvah. She made a deal with her parents, promising that if they let her skip the formalities, she’d find God in her life in some way. They said yes, and she never looked back.

She went from following the Grateful Dead to studying Native American culture in Arizona, learning to find God in every chirping bird and crashing ocean wave and epic Jerry Garcia solo. That was the God that Jaye felt connected to, not the one preached about in organized religion, which always felt so exclusionary and invidious and judgmental to her. She believes there is something higher than us and it’s guided by love and the universality of every living thing.

“While I don’t have any answers as to who or what God is, I’ve learned to turn to the stillness inside in those darkest and bleakest moments,” she says, “which has proved to be an inexplicable and unconditional source of solace, comfort and love time and time again throughout my life.”

Those are the revelations she sings about on this album, in songs like “The Kingdom is Inside of Me,” which is about “gathering the courage to confront what you fear most inside yourself, rather than running from it, in order to truly heal,” explains Jaye.

And it didn’t end with the songs. She also created a filmed companion piece, a Hymns & Hallelucinations Video Trip that Jaye calls “a 10-song full-length album visual and introspective, meditative, psychedelic exploration into the soul of a woman: her rage, her confusion, her sadness, her sexuality, her defiance, her darkness, her strength and her light.” Like the record, it’s the story of a woman discovering “the deepest parts of herself as she faces her fears head on, evolving along the way and becoming illuminated to the Ultimate Power behind it all.”

Jaye found the courage to make Hymns & Hallelucinations from her old friend, the late Ikey Owens, a Grammy-winning keyboardist for The Mars Volta and Jack White. When she had doubts about making a “gospel” record, Owens encouraged her to take the risk and even offered to produce. He passed away unexpectedly shortly thereafter, and she knew she had to finish this record in his honor.

Jaye ended up producing the record herself, along with musical support from William Tyler (Merge Records), Jack Lawrence (The Raconteurs), Luke Schneider (Third Man Records), and Mikaela Davis (Rounder Records), and the genius of Tucker Martine, who’s like the Gandalf of music mixing. (Seriously, he’s kind of an aural wizard.)

You might even notice a few sexual undertones in some of her songs. Which shouldn’t be all that shocking. The healing that comes with connecting with God isn’t all that far removed from reclaiming your strength and sexuality as a woman. It’s not something you hear about that often in mainstream religion, where we’re taught to repress and shame those parts of ourselves.

“Spirituality and sexuality are one and the same,” Jaye reminds us. “They both bring you closer to God. I want to reclaim all of the beautiful things about spirituality and sexuality that religion has co-opted.”

Hymns and Hallelucinations is gospel music for anybody who’s had a shitty year (or shitty years) and they’re looking for any sign of light at the end of the tunnel. This is gospel music for the souls who want to sleep in on Sunday morning, who don’t believe that anybody who doesn’t look like them or think like them or dress like them or love like them is the enemy. This is music for the people who believe love matters more than judgment, and we’re all infallible and imperfect and doing the best we can.

“I poured everything into making a record about the near-death experiences — personally, artistically, and professionally — that led me to understand myself in the hopes that it can help others going through the same thing,” Jaye says. “I want them to know they are not alone, that these trials life puts us through do have purpose.”

While these songs don’t offer all the answers, hopefully, they can make you feel connected to something inside yourself again. Because that’s where you’re really going to find God, isn’t it?