Pochop, a graduate of Berklee NYC's Songwriting and Production Master's programme, has always possessed the rare instinct to let songs breathe at their own pace rather than conform to the tyranny of the three-minute pop structure. *Powerlines* honours that instinct. The album opens with *I Miss Driving* — four minutes and seven seconds of restless, open-road longing that establishes the record's central tension immediately: the desire for motion against the weight of rootedness. It is a superb opener, the kind that makes you acutely aware of wherever you happen to be sitting.

What is immediately apparent throughout is the production philosophy at the album's heart. Rather than reaching for synthetic gloss or studio artifice, Pochop employed Impulse Response Collection to record the actual acoustic reverberations of Georgia O'Keeffe's home and studio in Abiquiu, New Mexico — quite literally bottling the ghost of one of America's great visual artists and releasing it across these seven songs. It is a conceptually thrilling move, the sort of interdisciplinary boldness that British critics tend to find in unlikely corners of the American folk tradition. The album does not announce this trick loudly; it simply hums with a specific, unrepeatable atmosphere. You feel the high desert walls even when you cannot see them.

*Pretty Please*, at a lean two minutes and forty-four seconds, demonstrates Pochop's ear for economy — a brief, pointed thing that cuts deeper for its brevity. *Down Low* and *Chasm* sit at the record's core with a kind of unhurried authority, the latter in particular carrying the weight of its title, a widening silence beneath the melody that pulls the listener toward its edge. *The Architect + The Artist* is perhaps the album's most overtly literary piece, wrestling with the creative tension that runs through all of Pochop's work: the builder's precision against the artist's surrender to chaos.

*American Habits* — the longest track at four minutes and twenty-three seconds — stretches out with the confidence of a songwriter who knows exactly how much space a song is owed. And the closing *Feeling Around in the Dark*, co-produced with Alexander Daoust alongside the opening track, brings the album full circle with a line that doubles as both artistic manifesto and the album's quiet thesis: *"I try to make lightning strike just feeling around in the dark."*

That Pochop chose to produce this record herself — with Daoust co-producing on just two bookending tracks, Russell Tanner mixing, and Nick Landis mastering — speaks to a creative self-possession that is genuinely rare. The indie folk-pop genre designation hardly does justice to what is, at its finest moments, a record of considerable emotional and sonic sophistication.

Texas Music Magazine once suggested that calling her merely a "songwriter" was like calling Gandalf a passable hand at fireworks. The hyperbole lands, because *Powerlines* is the work of someone who understands that folk music at its most potent is never really about the folk — it is about the specific, unrepeatable texture of a single human life pressed against the vast indifference of the world. Eliza Gilkyson called a previous record "timeless" and "intelligent." Both words apply here with equal force.

At seven tracks and just over twenty-six minutes, *Powerlines* is what the British press still rather romantically calls a "proper" record — nothing wasted, nothing superfluous, every second earning its place. The American West has produced no shortage of myth-makers. Jana Pochop is making a quiet, serious case to be counted among them.