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By: Adam Grant click to listen to Devour You
While writer's block is an occupational hazard that occasionally greets singer/songwriters at some point in their career, Janine Stoll is ironically confronted by the completely opposite problem - she has way too many songs to choose between. Though she is still out and about spreading the word about her 2005 release This Is Where We Bury It, there is a lot of work going on behind the scenes today in regard to deciding on how her future projects will look, and most importantly, sound. Having recently written her 100th song, Stoll feels that she has enough new tunes prepared for 5 or 6 new albums. The challenge with this is weeding through the stack and finding the ones that will work best for her. After all, that's what Stoll had to do following her 2001 debut offering Everything You Gave Me, when it came time to start preparing her sophomore disc. 
"I didn't want to release something that I really wasn't proud of," relays Stoll. "Between the time I did the first record to the time I did the second release, I had so much recording done, but I didn't want to compromise on the way that the record sounded and I wanted to make sure that I was extremely proud of what I put out. "That's why it took awhile to line up the right songs, to find the right producer and the right players, and the right sound - I didn't want to do something that was super generic." Generic would be a tough tag to attach to this songstress. Perhaps best described as a folk artist, there are still little inklings of jazz and acoustic rock just below the surface. However, the words in which Stoll scribes from one track to another is where the real intrigue is born - take for instance the romantically charged track "Devour You."
Featuring lyrics like, "kiss your sleeping eyes - they taste like apricot, I'll boil you in a pot, so I can drink your broth," and "I'll torture every inch until I taste your sweat," these types of overt metaphorically sexual lyricisms are quite indicative of Stoll's lack of concern of getting too personal, especially considering the fact that to this day she continues to have no regrets at all about how her craft is presented.  "This is a bone of contention with me - some people might think that I'm a totally open book," says Stoll. "I just put it all out on the table, so if it gets personal, for me, that's my form of expression and my form of art, so I never try to apologize for how personal it gets. "I try to make it a little bit cryptic so it leaves a little leeway for the person who's listening to make the song their own, or give it their own meaning," she adds. "I guess it's (about) not apologizing or compromising how personal you want to make your music." For more information on Janine Stoll, please visit www.janinestoll.com
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