When the pandemic first hit, a seemingly infinite amount of time was dropped into Carlyn Bezic’s lap. Coupled with worries new and pre-existing, it started to feel like this gift of time was moving out of phase. As this unease manifested, her second album under the Jane Inc. moniker came to fruition.
“It’s an album that deals a lot with anxiety and time feeling like it was refracting and expanding,” Bezic tells Complex Canada. “Time feeling like it was passing by really quickly or very slowly, trying to predict the future, feeling like I’m haunted by things in the past.”
This notion exactly is how she opens Faster Than I Can Take, out April 22. “The laws of time have changed/ Months pass in minutes, hours feel like days,” she sings softly on lead track “Contortionists” before its eventual dissolve into a shimmering disco number.
Bezic’s influences are immensely eclectic, citing funky guitar lines and the glitzy synths of ’80s pop. At some points, she even hints at her love of jazz-rock icons Steely Dan. A multi-instrumentalist, she says her sound differs depending on what medium she begins writing any given song with, whether it be guitar, bass, or just “fucking around on Ableton.”
“I like it almost being a collage, like a bunch of different sounds from a bunch of different eras just all kind of coming up against each other,” she says about her music. “That’s interesting to me, and that’s kind of the way I listen to music anyway.”
Though Jane Inc. fully came to during the pandemic, Bezic has been involved in Toronto’s music scene for years. She’s a touring member of U.S. Girls, a project that’s crept its way into the sum of her endeavors. She, alongside fellow touring U.S. Girl Amanda Crist make up local duo Ice Cream, while both ladies lend their chops to rock outfit Darlene Shrugg with other members of the project. This universe also sprinkles over into Jane Inc., with yet another U.S. Girls tourer, Dorothea Paas, lending backing vocals.
While playing in other projects, Bezic slowly worked on her Jane Inc. material. This eventually amounted to her aptly-named 2021 debut, Number One. As the live music industry shuttered, she was able to focus solely on Jane Inc., and Faster Than I Can Take came much quicker to her. That said, despite having two albums already under her belt, she’s only performed live as Jane Inc. twice.
“It makes it harder to kind of understand the songs in that way,” she says. “I’m trying to get more of a band together for my release show in May, but it’s hard when you don’t have a lot of time to play, because you kind of start to understand things about the songs when you’re playing them for other people.”
That fateful third show in May is on the 6th at The Garrison, and Bezic is still pondering how much of Jane Inc. is just a heightened version of herself, and what drives her eagerness to perform her own music regardless of her anxieties.
“I think it’s because of a deep desire to be seen…. I think sometimes performance is like a way of being seen where you are completely in charge of the parameters, and in that way, it becomes safer. So sometimes, putting on a character is like a safer way of being vulnerable.”
This contemplation between performance and self is directly related to Faster Than I Can Take’s overall themes of time and anxiety. Unable to showcase Jane Inc. to the fullest extent until recently, Bezic wondered if the window to do so was closing.
“I was also very aware how I was maybe running out of time in a career sense or something…. Also, I [was] just very aware that I was aging with every passing day, so it was kind of experiencing those two things happening at the same time. Feeling like, ‘OK, I can be in the moment. I can go on an aimless walk and it feels like there’s no consequences because I have no deadlines and I have no job to go to.’ But at the same token, I was like, ‘Oh, God, time is just continually passing, and I’m never gonna get it back. And how am I going to use it? And what am I going to do?’”
Faster Than I Can Take shows Bezic seamlessly navigating this crooked existence, pairing insular, soft moments with a rambunctious danceable groove. Throughout these ebbs and flows, she reassures us and herself that “It takes time.” It’s a grounding phrase that repeats itself over a psychedelic guitar riff on album closer “Pummeled Into Sand,” acting as reminder that the best is yet to come.
With a stunning new album and the opportunity to fully form her stage persona on the horizon, another reassurance emerges: This is just Jane Inc.’s beginning, even if time truly is contorting.
