Jess Clinton & Jen Cork

At just three years old, Jess Clinton couldn’t get enough of the microphone in her father’s home recording studio. Born an only child to her actress mother and film composer father, Clinton was steeped in the Los Angeles entertainment industry, surrounded by perpetual encouragement to explore the enthusiasms of creativity. Some of Clinton’s earliest memories are of toddling around recording studios enjoying the cozy, clean darkness of the control room. The fondest moments of her early musical determination can be found on converted tapes from her three-year-old freestyling sessions. Between takes of “Old MacDonald”, her father’s voice lingers as he can be heard assisting with the headphones and telling her to be careful of the microphone that she grasped with her small hands.

It was only a matter of time before the overflowing influence of expressiveness led Clinton down her own path of musical discovery. At the age of 12-years-old she picked up her first guitar, learning White Stripes songs by ear on her portable CD player. Around that same time, she started taking voice lessons, focusing on theatre and classical voice. Clinton was a technically born “valley girl,” so growing up in Hollywood, where the beauty standards are on figurative steroids, Clinton found a haven in her high school music program. She was able to write songs in secret about things she felt she had no one to tell. This could-have-been valley girl ended up a self-proclaimed art freak, as she still feels today. The limits of creation are non-existent, as Clinton ever-expands her boundaries and throws her dreams at the wall, always knowing one will stick.

Her LA music pedigree is composed of classical/theatre voice, mostly self-taught folk and rock guitar, all infused in the storytelling of film scores since very early on. Her family's roots in Appalachia and its music are woven throughout her eclectic tapestry of musical inspiration. Her love for Celtic music was born in college at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study in NYU, where she concentrated in Songwriting and Folk Musicology. Clinton’s influences come to life in her music. Each musical layer sets off a spark, leaving a single song engulfed in a burning blaze of assorted sounds.

Clinton’s arsenal of skills on acoustic, electric, and a beast of a guitar she’s named “Lola” (she has a dark brown voice), a 12-string baritone acoustic from a Woodstock luthier named Veillette, pair with the voice her heart whispers between each note. This time, it’s telling her to make noise. On her upcoming album, Real Glass Heart, Clinton is taking up space, letting herself feel the groove of the stories begging to be told. Clinton writes what feels good to sing. Songs show up on her doorstep, like a familiar friend listening to her experiences with mental health, love, nature, and quiet outrage.

An introvert who’s fluent in extrovert, Clinton is entirely transparent, letting each song thrive as its own personality, which are all a part of her. Shape-shifting soprano vocals range from bell-tone purities to sultry secrecies, her voice is the crowning jewel of her introspective tapestry of acoustically-driven song. Bringing both her serious expertise and jocular personality to stage and studio, Jess Clinton uses her music to communicate the most intimate parts of herself, re-defining what it means to be a woman, a creator, and the volumes in which she can speak her truth. Real Glass Heart is set for release in July 2019.

Ithaca, NY based singer-songwriter, Jen Cork has a passion for dirt, baritone ukes, 1904 uprights, vocal layering, and found sounds. She has been performing her original indie-folk, folk-jazz, and choice traditional folk, jazz, and blues covers around the Finger Lakes region and beyond for more than a decade.

Jen’s music, layered with powdered gravel harmonies and a meditative, introspective quality, moves audiences with its pure emotiveness. Pendulizing between self-soothing swing and deep grey, almost tangible sadness, the comforting space between—and the person, herself—are what is offered. She has been compared to k.d.Lang, Rhiannon Giddens, Dayna Kurtz, Melissa Etheridge, and Jeff Buckley, and her voice is just the beginning. From packed art galleries to camp fire circles in Michigan, from studio session work to deep listening rooms, Jen is at home.

A skilled singer, songwriter, producer, instrumentalist, collaborator, and bandleader, she is a well-known part of the music scene in Ithaca, NY. She ruminates on rusty turnbuckles. She loves the history, grit and intersection of nature and mechanical objects, and her emotional songwriting grows out of these timeworn landscapes. There is history in her voice and legacy in her songs.

Cork was named “Best Female Singer” by the Ithaca Journal.

Finger Lakes Music Press called her a “Superb Vocal Stylist,” and her band was selected to perform at the Confluence Benefit for the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, NY.

Jen is about to release her new single “Maybe Someday” and is touring around the Northeast US.