FEATURE: Spotlight: Jaguar Jonze — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Jaguar Jonze

__________

WHEN I do these Spotlight features…

I try to include artists from a broad spectrum of genres. I realise that, mostly, I highlight solo female artists. Maybe I should feature more bands, but I feel that women are creating the best music around. That has been the case for years now – and I know that will carry on through 2023. Someone who I have followed for a little while now and respect hugely, Jaguar Jonze should be better known here. The Taiwanese-Australian based in Brisbane is a sensation! I really love Jonze’s music and admire her hugely as an artist and pioneer. Real name Deena Lynch, she has additionally worked as a visual artist and a photographer under the pseudonyms Spectator Jonze and Dusky Jonze respectively. There has been this period of recovery, transition and growth for the thirty-year-old. Born in Yokohama, Japan to a Taiwanese mother and Australian father, she moved to Australia at age seven. As a child, she experienced abuse and was later diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder. By 2009, she was located in Brisbane. Come 2012, Lynch released her first album, Lone Wolf, as ‘Deena’. In 2015 came the second album, Black Cat. I wanted to include those difficult and upsetting personal details and her past professional releases to show where she has come from. As Jaguar Jonze, I feel we have this new stage and phase from a truly remarkable artist. I have so much respect and admiration for Jonze. Such an incredible inspiring and unbelievably talented artist, she (or Deena Lynch) is such a strong human being. Not to skip some key interviews and details, but there is a lot out there in the form of interviews. Jonze is such a fascinating and compelling figure. I discovered her music a few years ago. With BUNNY MODE, she released one of this year’s best albums.

Before coming to some interviews and reviews for the amazing BUNNY MODE, Primary Talent provide some details and biography about the truly wonderful Jaguar Jonze. This is an artist that everyone around the world should know and bond with:

“Life-changing serendipity happens only to a chosen few, and that moment took musician-artist Deena Lynch by surprise while playing an Iggy Pop tribute night in her native Brisbane, Australia. After witnessing the unhinged performance of a guy emulating Iggy, she knew she had to up her game. “So, I cracked down two tequila shots,” she recalls, and then transformed into a bona-fide banshee. “Everything I ever suppressed came spilling out. My shame and inhibitions broke down. I wasn’t afraid.” After that primal performance, she earned the nickname-turned-stage name Jaguar Jonze.

Signed to Nettwerk Records, Jaguar Jonze has released “You Got Left Behind,” “Beijing Baby,” and “Kill Me With Your Love” from her 2020 debut EP. At home in Australia, Jaguar Jonze has garnered the attention of The Music, Fashion Journal, Industry Observer and Tone Deaf, who writes "to sum up the creative explosion that is Deena Lynch into a neat little elevator pitch would have even the most qualified of journalists in tears." Jaguar Jonze was named by Cool Accidents as an “Artist To Watch” for BIGSOUND 2019 and was also named in Richard Kingsmill’s (Triple J) “Top 5 Artists from BIGSOUND 2019.” Deena is also a Triple J “Unearthed Feature Artist,” and made her performance debut on “Like A Version” for a cover of Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box,” alongside friends Hermitude. Jaguar Jonze also competed in Eurovision Australia Decides 2020 with her own original song “Rabbit Hole.” Abroad, after features on Spotify and Apple Music playlists, FLAUNT Magazine deemed her “nothing short of a manifold visionary.”

Jaguar Jonze’s music is multi-dimensional, representing her multicultural roots with her Taiwanese mom and her Australian Dad. Ultimately, Jaguar Jonze—and its adjacent projects, her narrative illustration project Spectator Jonze and her gender-subverting photography project Dusky Jonze—would become powerful ways in which Deena could process her most intimate vulnerabilities and traumas, while also using it to empower those around her to do the same. Her art in all facets, whether it be her music, visual art or photography is a logical extension of these vulnerabilities with each project mining depths of her personality”.

The pandemic was a tough time for everyone but, for Jonze, it was especially challenging. Even though 2021 was a fraught one that brought some definitely obstacles and darker moments (this is an interview I would advise people to watch), she did release some of her most important work to date. Refinery29 spotlighted Jonze in 2021 and talked with her about a tumultuous and eventful past eighteen months:

“To say that the past year-and-a-half has been tumultuous for Jaguar Jonze would be an understatement. The Australian musician, born Deena Lynch, recovered from a positive COVID-19 diagnosis, broke her silence about a sexual assault experience, and continued creating her art at a time when the music industry is struggling during the pandemic.

"[It's] worthy of a soap opera, I think," Jonze described how her life has panned out over the last 18 months, during an interview with Refinery29 Australia.

"It wouldn’t even rate that well as a TV show," she back-pedalled. "It sounds ridiculous and so much wouldn’t normally happen in such a short space of time."

But the hardships that have tested Jonze as a person have also led to some of her most important work across anti-harassment and racism advocacy, fashion and of course, music. And she's proud that she carried herself "with grace and fortitude through each obstacle."

It's all brought Jonze to the current moment, where she's eager to celebrate the release of her new short film, titled ANTIHERO. The film features a visual collection of five songs from her latest EP of the same name, where she sports bright outfits and uses "apocalyptic-cyberpunk anime" imagery to convey the wave of emotions she recently rode.

Jonze began recording, designing and conceptualising the EP after contracting COVID-19 in New York in March 2020. During her 40-day hospital stay, she said she "felt like my whole world crumbled around me". Creating music for the EP was "a way to escape my excruciating pain, anxiety and uncertainty around my health, the music industry and the world," she said.

As she remained unwell for five weeks straight, Jonze struggled with the prospect of her music career being cut short. "I was told that not being able to return to the music industry after surviving COVID-19 was a real possibility," she explained. "I wasn’t able to sing like I used to, I suffered from shortness of breath and chronic fatigue, not to mention loneliness from being in solitary confinement for so long."

This experience inspired the powerful imagery we see in her short film. "I escaped into worlds of apocalyptic-cyberpunk anime and incorporated it as fantastical symbolism into the visuals of ANTIHERO," she explained. "ANTIHERO and its encompassing visuals are all in the mind and are not to be taken literally”.

PopMatters published an extensive interview with her earlier this year to promote BUNNY MODE. The debut full-length as Jaguar Jonze, I am not going to include it all. There are some sections that I want to highlight:

“The Taiwanese-Australian singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and multimedia maven reveals a lot about her harrowing past. She’s a survivor of childhood abuse and, as an adult, was diagnosed with complex PTSD as a result of those experiences.

“The music is the opposite of blocking out traumatic childhood memories — that’s what I was doing my whole life and what was eating me up from the inside out,” she explains in response to a question about how the art form has helped change her life. “Music showed me how to take it out of my body and place it into a vessel outside of it — in song, melody, and lyrics. It allowed me to process what I had been through; instead of continuing to use the energy to suppress and deny it, I was able to heal, learn and move on.

“Music and art are important to me as it’s a way for me to have an honest dialogue with myself internally and with others in the world. I’ve spent my whole life being small and quiet, but now I have a voice. I hope others who have been through similar obstacles that I have, or feel isolated, or fighting for something bigger than they are, can connect with BUNNY MODE and know that they are not alone and that we can claim our power back.”

The album title is taken from a survival tactic she called “going bunny mode” during her youth, learning to stay silent instead of making herself heard by crying as a reaction to being threatened physically, emotionally, and psychologically. “This album is a journey of saying goodbye to that ’bunny mode,’” Lynch said in an April release announcing her upcoming LP. “Making this album has been this process of saying [to that tactic], ‘Thank you for saving me and allowing me to survive up until this point, but I don’t need you anymore.’”

PHOTO CREDIT: SHE IS APHRODITIE

From Deena to Jaguar

Persevering despite facing personal and professional obstacles, Lynch has been forthright about the perilous trip she has taken. Born in Yokohama, Japan, on 12 January 1992, she was raised by her single mother, who is Taiwanese, and moved to Australia (her father’s homeland) while approaching the age of seven.

Since then, Lynch has lived primarily in Brisbane, where she currently resides and also has spent time in Melbourne, Sydney, and Orange County. In elementary school, the youngster met Brisbane’s Joseph Fallon, who would later re-enter the picture as her guitarist, leading the way for the musical late bloomer.

Lynch’s education background included studying engineering at the University of Melbourne and business at Bond University. “I fell into writing music and playing guitar late in life, and it wasn’t really something I had in mind,” Lynch admits. “I was walking home one day from university and passed a garage sale, saw a guitar, and decided to buy it. I had just lost a close friend of mine and struggled a lot with the grief, and the guitar and songwriting became my catharsis. They weren’t great songs, but it was an important part of my life where I finally found a way to express myself and found passion in that. … At first, I just wanted the music to be a part of my life, and over time I wanted it to be my whole life.”

PHOTO CREDIT: SHE IS APHRODITIE

Initially using just her first name professionally, Deena was 20 in 2012 when she released the first of two independent albums — Lone Wolf. In February 2015, Black Cat followed, with Fallon on electric guitar and organ while Lynch sang and played acoustic guitar, keyboards, and organ.

“The guitar gives me the most joy to play, and I still write many songs on the acoustic guitar that I built myself,” Lynch notes. “I still don’t quite know how to play the guitar, I don’t know chord names or scales, but I always found the guitar to be so freeing because I can go with what sounds good and what sound I want to make on it.”

NAME GAME: So how did you decide to use Jaguar Jonze as your stage name/alter ego? Were you drawn more to the car, the cat or something else?

Deena: Ha ha, I’m definitely very similar to a cat in personality, and I have always been into cars growing up — but it is neither. Jaguar Jonze came about over time as a nickname that fans and friends gave me for how different I was on stage from real life. I’m like a big cat on stage — mysterious, ferocious, and dark, so it became this almost like a nothing name with alliteration. When it came to finding a name for my project, all the names I came up with felt so contrived, and I fell back on Jaguar Jonze. It was given to me, it meant something to me, and it suited the music I was creating, so I went with it.

PHOTO CREDIT: SHE IS APHRODITIE

UNDER THE INFLUENCE: Among the artists you loved growing up, whose songs motivated you to take the plunge?

Deena: Artists like Jeff Buckley, Johnny Cash, City and Colour, Portishead, Bryan Adams, Chris Isaak, and Paramore were artists I listened to growing up. Still, I loved a lot of different genres — R&B, K-pop, J-pop, heavy metal, indie rock, pop, folk, country, classical, and … anime soundtracks.

SUPPORT GROUP: Who have been your biggest supporters during not only your musical journey but also your courageous decision to advocate for change in the music industry?

Deena: My band — Aidan Hogg (bass/co-producer/synths), Joseph Fallon (guitar/string arrangements), and Jacob Mann (drums) — have been the biggest supporters of my musical journey and my decision to advocate for change in the music industry. They have always believed in me as an artist and have been by my side through thick and thin. That didn’t change through the advocacy and my decision to stand up to the industry. It also meant that they were at risk of those consequences too. The media and the public only see a certain side to the advocacy; my band has been there for me for the lowest moments and made sure I always had a support network through the ups and downs. I can never thank them enough — plus, they’re all talented human beings, and it’s a joy to write music and create any experience with them.

LABOR OF LOVE: If you weren’t making music for a living, what would you be doing?

Deena: I also love art — I love drawing, painting, photography, fashion, and film. At the bottom of everything, I feel like I am a storyteller, and my passion is in expression, no matter the medium.

JUST FOR FUN: What activities/hobbies do you enjoy the most when you’re not making music?

Deena: I love riding motorcycles both on the road and dirt. It’s a meditative space in my helmet where I can be present with my body and mind. And I love food way too much … not cooking, just eating. So I love discovering new restaurants and new flavors”.

Hard to put into words how exceptional Jaguar Jonze is as an artist and how amazing and utterly inspiring (as I have said earlier) Deena Lynch is as a person! I would advise you follow the Jaguar Jonze’s social media channels, watch all the music videos and interviews out there, and do some further reading. This is an introduction to an artist that some might not know about. BUNNY MODE is the album where she is set free and let loose. It is among the most essential and powerful albums released this year, that is for sure! The Guardian wrote this in their four-star assessment:

“I’m not gonna sleep below the glass ceiling,” Jaguar Jonze sings on her debut album, her voice barely a whisper.

Then, moments later with the volume turned right up: “You could’ve destroyed me, but then I got loud.”

This defiance is at the heart of Bunny Mode, an 11-track juggernaut that is cutting in its specificity. Its title refers to a survival tactic that the artist employed as a survivor of childhood abuse: a freeze response to any safety threats, like a frightened rabbit. The record is a middle finger to oppressors and abusers, as the artist – real name Deena Lynch – breaks free of their chokehold, rising anew.

The Brisbane musician, who released two EPs under the Jaguar Jonze moniker in 2020 and 2021, leans into an esoteric sound across Bunny Mode, fortified by the unbridled anger in her lyrics. Sonically and thematically, the record bears similarities to Halsey’s 2021 album If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power – both take cues from industrial music, building unapologetically feminist narratives and rebuttals upon glorious walls of sound. Despite the experimentation and boundary-pushing, it’s all still underpinned by pop and a knack for melody, as on the passionate slow-builder Little Fires, which Lynch performed as part of Eurovision’s Australian decider in February.

While there’s much to like musically – Bunny Mode moves away from the loopy spaghetti western sounds of Lynch’s early work to experiment with darker, heavier sounds, and the singer’s vocal chops are, as always, impressive – the album’s real power is in the lyrical details. It’s another piece of the activism puzzle for Lynch, who has spent much of the last two years on the forefront of fighting for change as a leader in the Australian #MeToo movement, shining a light on misbehaviour in the music industry. It also explores the more personal process of healing and recovery following trauma.

These many facets are visible through different threads of the album: on one of the more downbeat tracks, Drawing Lines, Lynch sings silkily of the importance of setting boundaries. The fury is more evident on tracks such as Who Died and Made You King, all angular guitars and punchy electropop beats, as Lynch spits, almost mockingly: “You’re sick and a victim of your own disease.” It’s thrilling to hear the tables turned on the powers that be in this way – a reclamation of space, a bold statement of self-sovereignty.

The highlight is Punchline, which turns a sharp eye on to tokenism and racism within the entertainment industry. In a similar fashion to Camp Cope’s The Opener, the Taiwanese Australian artist regurgitates box-ticking sentiments from corporate bigwigs to reveal their hollowness: “We love culture but make sure it’s to our very liking / Make it milky, make it plain and not too spicy.” Over wailing guitars and layered vocals, Lynch makes herself in her own image, rejecting the condescension of the white-centric industry that still sees artists of colour as an exotic other.

Lynch’s cohesive world-building across the album makes for a compelling, absorbing and often intimate listening experience. Her many creative personas – musically as Jaguar Jonze, visually as Spectator Jonze and photographically as Dusky Jonze – swirl through the record, but she emerges as a singularity: a woman who has, despite everything, survived.

After all the noise and the rage, the fire and the passion, it’s barely a whisper, again, that ends the record. The instrumentals cut out for Lynch’s controlled vocals to deliver their final, stinging words to the patriarchy and all that enable it: “It’s always been a man-made monster only a woman can destroy”.

PHOTO CREDIT: SHE IS APHRODITIE

I am going to round things off with a feature/review from Atwood Magazine. They went especially deep with BUNNY MODE (and Jaguar Jonze). I am predicting some really incredible things in 2023 for the Brisbane artist:

“Released June 3, 2022 via Nettwerk Music Group, BUNNY MODE is a radiant and raw experience – not to mention a jaw-dropping introduction to Brisbane’s Jaguar Jonze. The musical moniker for Taiwanese-Australian singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Deena Lynch, Jonze has been actively releasing music (and therefore, enchanting audiences) since early 2019; her 2020 debut EP Diamonds & Liquid Gold set a high bar with its cinematic scope, inescapably intimate lyricism, and seamless blend of alternative rock and indie pop influences. 2021’s smoldering follow-up ANTIHERO EP revealed the darker side of Jonze’s artistry, with heavier electronic influences and haunting lyrics (“I’ve never seen wrong be done right… It’s a bit of a twist for me to be a masochist, giving in to be blind“) dwelling in a space of turmoil and upheaval.

Those themes are still present throughout BUNNY MODE, yet there’s a reclamative aspect to Jaguar Jonze’s debut album that goes beyond the reckoning and into a space of healing, empowerment, ownership, and renewal.

“It’s been a long and turbulent journey behind this record, from being a sexual assault survivor to then being thrown into the spotlight as a figurehead of the #MeToo movement within the Australian music industry,” Jonze tells Atwood Magazine. “The trauma, obstacles, and pressure I’ve had to overcome have been overwhelming. I’m so grateful to have music as a cathartic outlet for what has been one of the most testing chapters of my life. I’m also so proud of how that journey translated through each song; I have found my voice, found my confidence, sought my own justice, and I’ve grown so much as a person and as an artist.”

“My vision going into this record was to create a safe space for all survivors to seek refuge, but it changed over the course of recording BUNNY MODE. It’s also about giving yourself permission to feel anger, not be silenced, speak up, fight, and show what incredible things are achieved when we work together to heal and be at peace,” she adds.

“I’m proud of what I’ve created. Every decision on this album and the visual world around it has had so much purpose and intention. I care so much about everything because I need it to have meaning.”

I hope ‘BUNNY MODE’ introduces me as a passionate person who wants to build worlds for us all to escape into and connect with.

Once a person who would become “still and quiet instead of crying out,” BUNNY MODE sees Jonze actively refusing to remain silent; in fact, the album is emphatically, undeniably loud in the best of ways as the artist wields wit, charm, stadium-sized pop, and searing punk energy to unveil her world and tell her stories. “This is a message to cut out the talk you do,” she feverishly sings in the assertive, explosive “Swallow.” “This is a message to dogs who said, ‘What?’… Go back home and swallow your own comedown.”

“BUNNY MODE was the name I gave to my symptoms of suffering from Complex PTSD, a condition I’ve been working through from a lifetime of trauma,” Jonze explains. “At the time, I didn’t know how to talk about it, and ‘bunny mode’ explained that it is when my survival mechanism kicks into freeze (rather than fight or flight). Like a bunny in the wild, I would act like prey, play dead and freeze when threats jeopardized my safety. This album is about thanking that survival mechanism for allowing me to survive until this point into adulthood, but also a farewell as I don’t need it anymore.

This album is a journey of saying goodbye to that ’BUNNY MODE.’ Making this album has been this process of saying – thank you for saving me and allowing me to survive up until this point, but I don’t need you anymore.

I can’t swallow your pride

I can’t swallow your lies

I can’t swallow your ego

You don’t turn me on

You don’t turn me on with your paradise

Go back home and swallow your own comedown

From start to finish, BUNNY MODE sees Jaguar Jonze finding strength in her vulnerability as she assumes full control over the narrative.

Her music is catchy, captivating, clever, and cathartic all at once. From the high-energy charge in songs like “SWALLOW,” “WHO DIED AND MADE YOU KING?, “PUNCHLINE” and “CUT,” to the more tender nuance in songs like “DRAWING LINES,” the stunning eruption “LOUD,” and her breathtakingly beautiful Eurovision 2022 entry, “LITTLE FIRES,” Jonze leaves a lasting, lingering mark through each of these eleven emotionally potent, deeply expressive songs.

Keep your head up, dry your eyes

I know the world can feel unkind

Think about what we’ve survived

We shouldn’t have to compromise

I’m not gonna sleep below the glass ceiling

I don’t need to hear another bad reason

History won’t get a chance to repeat

You can’t take this from me

So I’m gonna be noisy and I’m gonna be proud

You could’ve destroyed me but then

Then I got loud, loud, loud

– “LOUD,” Jaguar Jonze

While she’s a proven expert at employing colorful metaphors and larger-than-life imagery to get her point across, several of these songs find Jonze shedding all pretense in order to be as explicit, blatant, and uncompromisingly direct as possible. “This body’s mine and not for you to touch,” she sings in the self-assured “NOT YOURS,” with lines like “What made you think that it would be okay?” and “What life and stories did you live to make my choices dissipate?” driving her message home with calm conviction and blistering bluntness.

“I didn’t think this song would ever be released, but it was the first song I wrote after my sexual assault by two producers three months before writing it,” Jonze says of that track. “It was a cry to claim back my body”.

Go and follow and support the magnificent Jaguar Jonze. She has a worldwide fanbase, and there is a lot of love for her in the U.S. and U.K., in addition to Australia. I think that, when she tour internationally, her music will reach even more fans. There is no doubting the fact that she is…