There was a point when Jenna Torres‘ daughter asked, “Why do you write so many sad songs?” The New York City-based country singer responded, “When you listen to them, they make you feel better because you know you’re not alone.” Navigating her more wistful stories, Torres says “In some ways, it’s the antidote to hurt, and somehow it’s palliative when you find a comrade in pain, and you know that hurt is universal.”
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Sifting through a mixed bag of pain and rapture and into faith and hopefulness, Torres had the storyline for her fifth album, Heaven & Hurt.
“That’s what was real to me at this point, or was during the process of making this record,” Torres tells American Songwriter. “I’m not hiding the fact that I’ve tried, for most of my life, to really put on a happy face, and share a lot of joy with people. I do have a great capacity to feel joy and communicate joy, and make people feel better, but this time around, I did explore and allow for myself to feel and express the hurt side of things.”
Produced by Charlie Chamberlain and Irakli Gabriel, and recorded in Nashville—where Torres splits her time from New York—Heaven & Hurt also revealed songs that were more sensual and sexual in nature as well as spiritual and introspective.
“It fell into two of my favorite subjects, which are basically God and sex, which are sort of my obsessions,” laughs Torres. “That’s kind of the focus of my life, and I don’t mean sex in its most basic form. I mean sex in its capacity to connect us in the most powerful way.”
Following her 2021 release All Heart, concentrated around more love and lust, at first Torres questioned melding the two disparate subjects on Heaven & Hurt. “I thought, ‘Oh no, what have I done?’” says Torres. “I’ve reached out and talked about heaven, and I then I talked about the carnal, essential aspects of life. What ties these two things together, other than the fact that it is human to have both of those things existing simultaneously?”
Throughout Heaven & Hurt, Torres plunders the fault lines of love from the opening tracks “Godspeed” and “You Can’t Tell a River” and moving forward at the end of love to the slower crooned “Tell Me In Kisses.” The rockier “Stirring Embers” and “Tennessee Heat,” fill the more heated affairs of the heart with the other side of the spectrum, of shedding painful loves and experiences on mid-tempo “Chattahoochee” and “Just a Mountain.”
When everything breaks, here on Earth / Hearts and bones and our self-worth / When it all shatters / Remember you matter / Because that’s just how love and life work, sings Torres through the title track, setting up the reminder For better or worse / It’s a whole lot of heaven and hurt. For Torres, it was the final song that tied the two sides of her album together.
“It’s about how the tangible things break,” shares Torres. “It encompasses the purity and the excitement of what we feel. It’s the incredible highs that we’re capable of in these human bodies. It’s the elation, the euphoria, the connection, our bodies together, and then how much it hurts to be alive.”
Torres adds, “That’s sort of what it is to be a human. At some point, we break, and then we break free. When we’re gone from this place, there is no more pain. We get to keep the heaven, but we let go of the hurt.”
In a world that’s focused on more superficial and exterior illusions, says Torres, there’s a tendency to camouflage the truth. “We literally wipe it away,” she says. “I think the opportunity to be real is the final frontier, and it’s something that we need to remember when we have the capacity to literally artificially create worlds that don’t connect us to who we really are, and what our human experience is all about.”
The more heartrending “Your Time to Fly” also roves around mortality—I can walk you to the door of heaven / They’re not gonna let me come inside / I’m still waiting to get my wings / But it’s your time to fly. “Death is a part of life, and it is something that I found myself addressing in song because I needed to put it somewhere,” reveals Torres. “I thank God every day for song because I have a place to put the hardest things.”
Throughout Heaven & Hurt, pain reveals grace and gratitude on the gospel-driven epistles of acceptance “Can’t Tell a River” and “Prayers Up,” and through the more plaintive closer “Private War,” with Torres singing If I win, I lose / And if I lose, I win/ Nobody’s keeping score.
“At the end of the day, I closed my eyes and I thought, ‘Well, this is as vulnerable as I can be,’” shares Torres of “Private War,” which closes the album and was nearly cut entirely. “Time just keeps moving, and I do believe that taking risks is worth it. I would rather see what’s on the other side of risk than never know.”
Despite any despair, insists Torres, throughout Heaven & Hurt there’s ultimately a continuing line of hope. “I run on hope, and even though I have my hopeless moments and dark nights, I definitely am a person of faith,” she says. “I’m a believer, so infused in every song is this idea that you can never give up hope. I’m not into abject despair. I want people to hear these songs, and know that there is hope. I’m more about the resurrection. Everything has a continuum of life. Life is eternal, and there’s a lot of hope to be had.”
For Torres, her hope comes from being a “tomorrow” person.
“Yesterday is gone,” she says. “I like to think about what else there is, what’s before me and what else there is to do, what else there is to see, and have, and feel, and know about in this crazy adventure that we’re on.”
Photo: Katrina Brooks / Courtesy of The Press House
