No Shame Being Poor, Pi Jacobs Sings
There is a defiant joyfulness in the way Pi Jacobs sings, as if being up there at the microphone, sharing stories of her own and other peoples’, is hard won and very much appreciated.
Even the way she holds her head up high as she cradles the words inside the melody shows resilience. “It’s no sin to be poor,” she cries out in the release of the new single of the same name off her Two Truths And a Lie album from Travianna Records.
It is no wonder Americana Highways calls this bluesy folk singer “unpretentiously honest,” and — in this particular case — the honesty is palpable.
There is no doubt pain in her memory of standing in line for food stamps with her Mom when she was four years old. But as the words emerge, what comes through even more is the need to dance to make it through, like she and her mom did.
“Sing, live, laugh, cry, love, repeat,” is the mantra Jacobs proclaims on her Twitter handle and it is clear, watching her in the new video for the single, that she intends to push through it all, and help us do the same.
“When I’ve been really poor — like when I was little and again in my mid-20s — I had fun anyway, I had fun doing stupid stuff, like dancing around the house,” she said, a smile growing on her lips. “And my hope right now, through everything going on [with Covid-19] is that people can use silliness and fun and dancing and all that kind of stuff, that they can find good healthy positive ways to cope.”
To foster that healthy happy dancing-in-the-face-of-disaster idea, Jacobs solicited friends, family and fans to “film their reality during quarantine” for the single’s new music video by creating a hashtag #NoSin2BPoor. The result is an amazing amalgam of people coping creatively, as she suggests. Watch the video now!
“The silver lining of all this is that it has gotten more people participating in the creative process than ever before. Typically, we wouldn’t have asked for people to participate, we would have wanted the video to be really slick…but this is something like 40 phone videos all slapped together. This looks more like reality!”
In fact, the video displays well the tough “dancin’ in the dollar store, lookin’ good in those secondhand clothes” coping that Jacobs sings about in the song, the coping that she and her mother before her used to get through it, and go on to get educated and thrive.
“My mom was the first in her family to get a college education,” Jacobs says proudly. “Looking back at that line we had to stand in, it’s important to understand that it’s ok to need help sometimes. Help can be a temporary thing. For anyone going through this right now, it’s important not to be ashamed of it.”
Patience, kindness, more understanding for ourselves and those in our communities, this is what No Sin To Be Poor conveys, and what Jacobs is so bullish to get across. And, of course, the importance of being creative, which, she says, doesn’t require money and stuff. With all her guitars, and the tools she’s built up over the years in her studio, she says, “what’s really important is being emotionally honest.”
It is that refreshing honesty that comes through during Jacobs’ “Midday Snack,” brief live-stream performances she posts from her L.A. studio on her website daily at 12:15 Pacific.
“It gives me a reason to show up for work every day, a reason to get dressed,” she says, laughing. “I just need a routine. It is really helping me. I don’t know what’s gonna change, so I have to stay open new ideas and new things.”
Improvisation is something Jacobs learned well in her college classes on jazz. It’s a good time for it, she says, and even though the video for the song is complete, she requests that people keep posting their own improvised, joy-filled coping strategies by making videos on their social media and tagging them #NoSin2BPoor.
“People need an outlet and a way to express themselves,” she says. And she is a great example.
Listen to my great conversation with singer/songwriter Pi Jacobs at https://www.talkingtostrangers.co/podcast.
