Jaden South: Leading the Horse
By
Dave Heaton 31 May 2009PopMatters Associate Music Editor
Jaden South, the Nashville-based duo of Jessica Draper and Deborah DeLoach, play a folksy sort of bluesy sort of rock-ish sort of maybe-country sort of pop music that blurs all of those styles together until they meet in a nowhere-land in the middle. They have strong singing voices, far as I can tell, but there’s a murkiness to the whole endeavor that keeps anything from really hitting. They sing over each other more than with. The melodies plod. The lyrics make some specific references – to someone named Norma Jean, to drawing lines in snow, to moving from one place to another – but then blur away any specificity until you’re not quite sure what’s going on, or why you’re listening.
Dave Heaton has been writing about music on a regular basis since 1993, first for college newspapers and DIY fanzines and now mostly on the Internet. In 2000, the same year he started writing for PopMatters, he founded the online arts magazine ErasingClouds.com, for which he is still the editor and main writer. He also writes music reviews for the print magazine The Big Takeover and has a blog column on their website, BigTakeover.com. He has a Bachelors degree in Journalism (1996) and a Masters degree in English (1999), both from Truman State University, in the underrated town of Kirksville, Missouri, Though he does enough music-listening and writing for it to be a full-time job, it is not one. He has held a series of editing, writing and business communications positions at small and large companies in Kansas, Michigan and Pennsylvania. He currently lives in Kansas City.
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