INTERVIEWS ME LOST ME

ME LOST ME SHOWS STRONG SIGNS OF ‘DOING A DAWSON’ ON HER LATEST ALBUM. LEE FISHER CAUGHT UP WITH JAYNE DENT TO TALK CREATIVITY, COLLABORATION AND CAR ALARMS

IMAGE BY AMELIA READ

Spending time with Jayne Dent will make even the most energetic person feel like a slob: Dent is a whirlwind of restless creativity, always on to the next project while you’re still digesting the one before. Which explains why since finishing her fourth, genuinely remarkable album RPG, she’s formed new projects, developed new artistic practices and generally created! For Dent, it’s all one thing.

“I find it hard to totally distinguish stuff sometimes, I guess it depends on the context people experience it in,” she explains. “I just make stuff. I’ve been doing a lot of textiles stuff recently, a lot of printmaking and drawing, and a lot of that doesn’t leave my room, but it might inform the music in other ways. Like I might have an idea and think, ‘well I could explore this in a drawing and maybe I’ll make a song inspired by the drawing’.” As RPG’s closer Science & Art makes clear, the creativity is the whole point. “It just feels like a natural compulsion to make stuff. That’s what it’s about for me, just making stuff. It’s just the joy that comes from it.”

Dent didn’t set out to make an album rooted in ideas about digitally generated landscapes and adopting roles but it soon shaped the songwriting. “I wrote a couple of songs that were more game-focused because I went through a phase of being like really, really games obsessed and I thought this might be fun and interesting… all of the songs on the previous album were inspired by real landscapes, and now I’ve written some that are inspired by digital landscapes, so that might be an