Jana Horn is “just transfixing” (NPR Music). Today, the Texas-born songwriter announces her new album, The Window Is The Dream, out April 7th on No Quarter, and presents its lead single, “After All This Time.” The Window Is The Dream is a Rothko-esque color field set to music, venturing even deeper into Horn’s inner space than her stark, acclaimed 2021 debut Optimism, which earned praised from countless outlets including Pitchfork, The FADER, NPR, MOJO, and Stereogum, who deemed it “a truly classic debut.” “I wrote Optimism at a very transient time in my life, when I was in no place at once and everything was slipping through my hands like a wet fish,” Horn says. The Window Is The Dream, however, “was written in one room, essentially. When you have nowhere to go, you go into memory, and memories of dreams… I was in a different headspace.”

“After All This Time” takes in fever-dream tropicalia, filtered through Horn’s signature sparse lens, and features cello arrangement by Jared Samuel Elioseff. Elioseff recorded most of The Window Is The Dream at Pale Moon Sessions in Cambridge, New York, with additional recording happening alongside Craig Ross at Studio 4 in Austin, Texas. Other collaborators were pulled from Horn’s days in the Austin music scene — sometime-Bill-Callahan-drummer Adam Jones and experimental guitarist Jonathan Horne to name a few — who provided a different kind of creativity during downtime. “They were making the studio at the time, so I was part of the process,” says Horn. “I would be tiling the bathroom floor with Sarah during the breaks, or helping Adam install the toilets.”

The Window Is The Dream is an entry into a world very much Horn’s own, where the words and the music only serve to showcase the inviting gaps in-between. The magic lies in feeling the space, in waiting to see what comes next. “There’s this wonderful mystical quality about writing,” Horn says. “It’s always a surprise and a joy to uncover something that maybe was waiting to be unwrapped.” She clarifies, “I hope that I’m presenting things in such a way that’s not ambiguous, but abstracted, so that you enter in. Some people describe my lyrics as being not specific enough, but I’m not interested in presenting a diary. I’d like you to feel your way through it.”