Star Apps: Jena Malone
Jena Malone ("Saved," "Pride & Prejudice," "Into the Wild," "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire") has been acting for almost 20 years and recording music for eight. She and Lem Jay Ignacio are The Shoe, which this year released its first full-length album, "I'm OK." You can see Jena Malone now in "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1." We talked about The Shoe, shooting nude, and balancing her music and film careers.
The other Shoe has dropped: I'm OK is out now.
The band is called The Shoe because?
The Shoe is whatever instrument I want to play. In this particular rendition of The Shoe, it's mostly vocal effects, looper, live percussion, and electronic drums. For our first record, there was a keyboard and mono synth and a few other things. But this is a more pared-down Shoe kind of vibe.
Between naming the band The Shoe and your label, There Was an Old Woman Records, I'm assuming that the "There was an old woman who lived in a shoe" rhyme must have left a major impression on you.
I just liked it because there's this innocent idea around it having been a children's story, and I wanted to build something I could live out of and tell stories out of. You can box it up and take it on the street and unveil it and have all these things come out of it. Every time I talked about it, I just kept thinking back to the old woman who lived in a shoe with all her children and did her laundry there and just kept moving it around. It was a natural fit. I didn't think too deeply about it. It was just a nice image that made sense for it.
As a child you moved around a lot. Could there be a connection there?
I was born a gypsy. I was raised in the life of an actor and led a similar life. I always found a home wherever I put my head. With music, I just want to be able to play anywhere and everywhere and not make it this rigid thing. I just want to have as much flexibility as possible.
Most of us know you as an actress. When did your interest in music develop?
I love music. I've always been into music. As a teenager, it becomes how you form your sense of identity and teaches you about life in strange ways. I feel like I started to come of age with music at 20 years old, when I started singing a lot to myself and wanted to create music. I started making music for myself and accidentally developed singing Tourette's. I was just singing all freestyle all the time and couldn't really control it. I was annoying a lot of my friends, but I just felt that there was something that needed to come out, that needed to be channelled, that needed to be worked on.
You appear nude in The Shoe's "Dead Rabbit Hopes" video. Was there a moment where you asked yourself, "Is this the right step creatively?"
The world is made on the works of brave men and brave women. i'm sure there's always a point in everyone's life where they're about to do something very revealing and very personal and very courageous, where they question if it's OK. All I had to do was send it to my little sister, who was 16, and say, "Tell me yes or no." And she wrote back "Yes" with 18 smiley faces. So I knew that would be OK.
What inspired your decision to do it?
For me it was all created out of purity. It was a very pure exchange. Artist Alla Penner does these beautiful paintings of nude women, and her artwork is very inspiring. Mix that with the album, which is very raw and vulnerable and about me peeling back my layers and getting back to a storytelling voice that speaks for something more personal. I couldn't imagine a better interpretation for our first video than that. For me, a woman's sexuality is like an Excel spreadsheet. In the modern society, it's everywhere. People are selling coffee and tampons and guns and beer and Vaseline using a woman's body. I've never liked that, and I don't understand why a woman's body isn't used in a higher degree as the work of art that it is and not a commodity to sell. So I guess I just wanted to take back my own piece of art. I really wasn't worried about what anyone else was thinking, because sometimes you really have to think out of the box of society to show society what they need to be asking themselves.
How do you balance your film work with your music?
You just do one thing at a time and do it the best that you can. You answer as many emails as you can in your off-hours, so your daytime can be spent doing amazing creative things. Try not to take on too many things at once. I've been lucky to get to do a lot of beautiful things, and the more beautiful things you do, the more hungry you are to create more beautiful things.
Speaking of hunger, what can you tell us about "Mockingjay - Part 1"?
Not one word.
OK. What are your top mobile apps?
1. I use Yelp pretty much every single day, because I have a concierge inside of me, and all I want to do is cater to other people's needs and figure everything out.
2. I love Instagram, because I'm absolutely photo obsessed.
3. I use WomanLog, because it keeps track of my menstrual cycle, which is very important as a traveler.
4. Moon Phase, which tracks the moon and is really important to know when you're planning dates. As a band and actor, I like to know where the moon is going to be on certain days.
5. And I use the good old Camera+ for a little photo edit on the go.
