“Just like Lou Reed’s early solo work seems to whisper secrets about New York City and its lost people, Money on Jane’s first installment speaks in some kind of punk stutter from a Nashville too often hidden from view. Listening to this collection of songs is a trip to the city’s lesser-known corners, where disappointments and dreams fight it out. And that’s a little closer to what’s really going on down there.

Musically, there’s a history to the Money on Jane sound. It’s a history that echoes some earlier visits to Music City, made by outsiders like Simon and Garfunkel, the Beau Brummels, Dylan. But make no mistake, this recording circuits through the past only in the name of discovering the future of what Pete Seeger once called “handmade music.” Money on Jane makes me think of might happen if the Americana music of today, so often well- behaved, took a place on Freud’s couch and started talking about what was going on in its head.

So where did Money on Jane come from, why is this project, built to have a future, starting now? Answering that requires a little talk of Nashville and its song and record people. Hang in there with me.

There are layers to Nashville. Some of those layers are pretty much buried, nothing you’ll see on the tours that shuttle visitors down Music Row. It’s a town of big projects, small projects, and everything in-between. We know (and often love) the commercial music, but there’s a lot of stuff that hovers out at the margins. For those music people who want to make a life making the stuff, survival in Nashville is about working in and with all of it. You learn not to say no, to scale up and scale down, play different roles, be a songwriter one moment, a producer the next, a background singer or a percussionist, if someone mistakes you for either and needs your services. You do whatever keeps you working. Staying in town means staying open.

Money on Jane is a project created by two music people who have spent a few decades being different things in Nashville’s music scene. They’ve gone between the layers, worked in studios and on stages, played in clubs and faced arenas. The home they made is a creative place, where you might find a song in the cereal cupboard, where records get made in bedrooms. Two people found one another, and then they found the music between them. They’ve made a good life of it, but they’ve also learned about the great pitfall: for all the paid work you do, there’s always a pile of songs that haven’t found their place in the world, the personal stuff, the music that keeps asking for a little attention but only gets it when an artist makes the conscious effort. Money on Jane is the house Angelo Petraglia and Eulene Sherman have created for their homeless music, for the songs that have been waiting for them, the ones that need a place to stay.

The first installment in Money on Jane’s new recording adventure leans a little more toward Angelo’s pile of songs, but both members are in there throughout. The sound has some rock and roll to it, the loose production of the Brian Jones-era Rolling Stones, and the street imagery of some New York punk. There are some truths about being a Nashville musician that come out along the way, some longing and some chaos. If, as suggested above, this music fits in the broad category of Americana, it’s Americana’s unconscious, it’s memories forcing their way out. It’s songs about being in a cult, getting too high at the wrong time, about the worry and the wonder of the dreamer’s life.

I’m not going to share the band members’ credentials, the evidence of their movement between Nashville’s layers, the Grammy action and so forth (for all that, see Appendix A). That will come out when people talk and write about Money on Jane. And it should, because this band has a deep backstory. I’m more interested in what’s here and what’s now. I’m interested in “Nashville ‘93” and “God Sends the Devil.” I see something coming that’s built to evolve and devolve and wander where it needs to. I’m seeing that pile of songs come to life, and it makes me wish all of my favorite career music people would take a year off to record the ones that seemed just too personal, a little too strange to send out into the world. But for now, I’m glad Money on Jane is doing it. These are the stories they’re supposed to be telling. They’re telling me that I should tell mine.”

— Warren Zanes

Author

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