CHRIS NEUMER: Have you found that with the degree of success you have had that any of your personal relationships have been affected?
JENNIFER HALL: Yes. It’s really hard, there are friends that are actors - it’s just such a rough road. With my friends, some of them, I mean people blossom at all different times, you know?
CHRIS NEUMER: I’m still waiting for my own.
JENNIFER HALL: (Laughs) yeah. So you have to constantly encourage the ones that haven’t blossomed yet to keep at it, and then they look at you and they think, well you’ve gotten everything. And I still have things that I want to do in my life, so then I can’t really talk to them about that, because they’re listening from the point of view that, "Well, you’ve already had some success." And then boyfriends, forget about it.
CHRIS NEUMER: Are you friends with Tara?
JENNIFER HALL: Yeah.
CHRIS NEUMER: She mentioned that your current boyfriend not in the industry.
JENNIFER HALL: Yeah.
CHRIS NEUMER: Now that seems like that would help a lot.
JENNIFER HALL: It’s the best thing ever. I’ve dated actors, it’s devastating, disastrous.
CHRIS NEUMER: I don’t pry into any personal matters, but if you could, do you feel comfortable talking about why this is devastating?
JENNIFER HALL: Because if any time my career would take a step and theirs didn’t, I’d have to either pretend that my career wasn’t taking a step or I’d just have to end up living these double lives, where you’re excited about what’s going on. It could just be me; maybe I’m awful at expressing myself in a relationship.
CHRIS NEUMER: Oh no, it’s not you. What you just said is what I’ve gotten time and time again. Just unfortunately, I can’t write it if you haven’t said it. What you said, it’s just the combination of, if you both want the same thing, both of you going for the same goal, and one of you gets it first, there’s just that resentment, that subtle underlying to the current.
JENNIFER HALL: And then being a woman. I’d like to find a woman that is in a relationship where they earn more money than the man.
CHRIS NEUMER: I’d like to find that too, and then I’d like to end up with her. I have no problem with that, none whatsoever.
JENNIFER HALL: I’m from the south, I’m from Alabama, and I don’t know if that’s just…
CHRIS NEUMER: Anywhere specific in Alabama?
JENNIFER HALL: Yes, Coleman, Alabama, northern Alabama, near Birmingham.
CHRIS NEUMER: Oh, I’ve never heard of it. How do you get from Alabama to Ithaca? And if you give me a highway I’m going to laugh.
JENNIFER HALL: The long road. My mother joined the military and she is in the military, so we traveled a whole lot. Never ended up in New York, but the closest we got was Washington, DC. Then I auditioned for a consortium of colleges. I wanted to go to Carnegie, but I never auditioned, and it’s hard to get into a school if you’ve never auditioned, or Cincinnati Conservatory.
CHRIS NEUMER: I think you made the right call; I don’t really think Cincinnati is good for anything, is it?
JENNIFER HALL: Well, at the time it was really good for musical theater. I just saw this prime time thing… no, never mind, whatever. But I think maybe it’s the South in me that brings out this weird idea that, "Women are supposed to earn less money than men."
CHRIS NEUMER: Do you believe that?
JENNIFER HALL: No! And see, I wasn’t raised that way; I always end up with these Southern men that have these weird stigmas, so no more Southern men. So if you’re from the South, forget about it. But let me tell you about the two films I did this summer, so you can write about them.
CHRIS NEUMER: Ok.
JENNIFER HALL: The first one I did — they’re both indies. One is called Lenexa, 1 Mile and it’s with Billy Baldwin and Chris Klein, Jason Ritter and Josh Stewart, who is awesome.
CHRIS NEUMER: Chris Klein, huh? Who directed it?
JENNIFER HALL: Jason Wiles. He was on Beverly Hills, 90210, but more recently he was in a TV show shot in New York called Third Watch, which is now gone. He was the star. But I got to write music for the movie.
CHRIS NEUMER: Is that an added bonus for you?
JENNIFER HALL: Yeah, I’ve never written music for a film before.
CHRIS NEUMER: Was this composition a score, or was it a song?
JENNIFER HALL: A song and I think I actually play it on the piano.
CHRIS NEUMER: So you are versatile, good at things from spoons to pianos.
JENNIFER HALL: I’m not very good, I learned piano.
CHRIS NEUMER: Just tell me you can’t do Calculus, just tell me that and I’ll feel better.
JENNIFER HALL: No, but my sister’s a math genius, for real.
CHRIS NEUMER: Is she writing songs and stuff too?
JENNIFER HALL: No.
CHRIS NEUMER: Oh thank god.
JENNIFER HALL: But she’s 23.
CHRIS NEUMER: Well that’s something, that’s creative in its own unique way.
JENNIFER HALL: Yeah. But I got to do that, and that was fun.
CHRIS NEUMER: Now let me ask you this, and I’m going to stop you here because I want to hear about these movies, but I want to hear about these movies in a way I can actually use. What was it about these projects that initially attracted you to them? Start with the one you were just describing. What was it that attracted you to it, and you were like, "This is where I’m going and this is what I’m going to get excited about so I can bounce up and down in a chair during an interview?"
JENNIFER HALL: For this film, the most exciting part was getting to be involved in the music in the film. I’ve never done that before. And get to sing, I’ve never sang in a film.
CHRIS NEUMER: Do you sing outside of film? Somewhere between the shower and the film world, do you sing?
JENNIFER HALL: Yeah. I did Broadway in New York, and I have a rock band, Thistle LLC. And then I have a vanity project called Black Licorice, and it’s a two-girl acoustic punk band. And we sing dirty songs about camel toe, peeing in the shower and stuff like that.
CHRIS NEUMER: Those are dirty songs?
JENNIFER HALL: They get dirty.
CHRIS NEUMER: Now this is the goal. Do you have any samples, demos, anything like that I could take a listen to or Black Licorice? I’m not sure how to spell licorice, come to think of it. Is it L-I-C?
JENNIFER HALL: L-I-C…umm.
CHRIS NEUMER: Jen Hall cannot spell the name of her own band.
JENNIFER HALL: It ends I-C-E.
CHRIS NEUMER: That’s the part I got stuck with: does it end in rice.
JENNIFER HALL: Now you’ve sabotaged me.
CHRIS NEUMER: I’m sorry, I’m bad.
JENNIFER HALL: My spelling has been thwarted.
CHRIS NEUMER: Fortunately Jen Hall is pretty easy to spell.
JENNIFER HALL: I’m working on getting us a little five-song thing. I’ve got an inbox, which is kind of like pro tools outside of your computer, and I’ve been going crazy, doing samples, accordion — I’m not a very good accordion player, but I’ve been playing and recording.
CHRIS NEUMER: Wow.
JENNIFER HALL: Getting sounds of traffic and recording my friends’ conversations, and putting them into songs. So I’ve been trying to get together some Black Licorice songs, but there’s only so many you can find for Thistle.
CHRIS NEUMER: Is it similar in sound to Black Licorice?
JENNIFER HALL: No. It’s like rock.
CHRIS NEUMER: So do you play up on the strip at all, around there?
JENNIFER HALL: We play in San Francisco. We just finished a one month residency in San Francisco, where we played every Tuesday. We’re actually putting together a show in New York; we played in New York as part of a gallery. Our lyricist is JT LeRoy.
CHRIS NEUMER: Should I know that? You say that, and I don’t know the first thing about musical lyricists.
JENNIFER HALL: JT LeRoy is a novelist, if you Google him you’ll see.
CHRIS NEUMER: So when is the project in New York coming up?
JENNIFER HALL: We’re not exactly sure; someone else is putting it together. So that’s what I do, I am a singer. I play around town. I play some of the Black Licorice music by myself at Open Mic’s.
