Baltimore-based songwriter Jana Hunter of the indie pop band Lower Dens, has gained success in music, but it wasn’t her first calling.
“The only thing I wanted to be was a political journalist and I didn’t go to college so I became a musician instead,” Hunter said told CNN. “I remember very clearly the drive to be someone who stood in between politicians and the public and helped to hold politicians to their word to expose, you know, subtleties of politics that maybe wouldn’t be clear.”
The newest Lower Dens album “Escape from Evil” was featured in Vogue and Hunter told CNN that the album is “centered around the idea of simplicity — simplifying song structures and concepts.”
Hunter says that her desire to simplify comes from living in a complicated world crowded with information that has made it exceedingly difficult to be well-informed.
“When you have a political and media system that is so inherently tied to capitalism and where you have politicians who are afraid of not being able to keep their careers unless they say whatever the people want them to say, then you end up with the animal intuition that we have to survive,” Hunter said.
See more of our interview in the video above.