Songwriters:
Jennifer O'Connor

Jennifer's career began in Atlanta, where after college she joined Violet, a band compared to X and the Pixies. She started playing solo after quitting Violet and moving to NYC. Her influences are other artists with a fresh take on self-awareness, from Destroyer, Silver Jews, Aimee Mann, and Smog, to Dylan and Petty, as well as Jay-Z, Kanye West, and Dizzee Rascal.

Jennifer released her debut EP, Truth Love Work, in 2000. 'Time Out' wrote, "O'Connor is another Liz Phair or Elliott Smith waiting to happen. Her understated guitar-based songs lack the primping, preening and obviousness of Phair and the sad-sack whining of Smith. Rather, her matter-of-fact lyrics tell stories that us regular joes can relate to." Her self-released, self-titled debut followed in 2002, and Red Panda released the acclaimed 'The Color And The Light' in May 2005.

Over The Mountain... is her 3rd full-length, but it has the immediacy of a debut. The past year saw many personal upheavals which informed it more than she expected. "It's been so tumultuous, I think that inevitably crept into my songs," she says. "I wouldn't say that I always write from experience, but I did a lot of it on this record." For her most emotional songs yet, she self-produced and got rid of reverb and extraneous sounds, giving them an urgency that her other records didn't always have. She explains, "There's a lot of space; we purposefully pared everything down to what was necessary for the song."

Jennifer recorded her new LP/CD 'Here With Me' earlier this year with John Agnello (Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth) at Brooklyn's Headgear Studios. Backed by a crack backing trio of Jon Langmead, Michael Broadlieb and Michael Strandberg (and joined, briefly, by Hold Steady keyboardist Franz Nicolay), O'Connor tackles her most evocative pile of relationship-tunes with something approaching surgical precision.