Jennifer Terran was born in Los Angeles, growing up in the 70’s on a dead e… Read Full Bio ↴Jennifer Terran was born in Los Angeles, growing up in the 70’s on a dead end street in North Hollywood suburbia. She was the youngest of five children and raised Mormon though she would leave her religion at 15. Her mother Adele Kathryn was an intense, passionate woman, an artist, a dancer and a singer. Jennifer's parents met at a nightclub- her mom singing in a very tight, sexy sequined dress, her father Tony Terran in the band.Her father, a full Sicilian, was born in Buffalo, New York and began playing trumpet in his early teens. He got stuck in Los Angeles when the leader of his touring big band refused to pay for his return fair to New York. So he had no choice but to stay in LA where at 18 (and with a full head of hair at the time), he landed being one of the band members in the “I love Lucy Show”. This began his successful career as a studio player playing on over 10,000 records, T.V. sessions and motion pictures playing with nearly every influential musician and band on the planet including the Beatles, Frank Zappa and Ella Fitzerald. He was almost always the loudest instrument in the mix.

Jennifer did her first featured home concert in her living room when she was about 4. Soon after she performed in several musical theater productions. She was 5 when she started her first entrepreneur business selling “back scratches” to her family members for five cents.A favorite pastime was singing songs from the 70’s pop song books while her oldest sister April accompanied her on piano. The family broke up with a divorce when Jennifer was 8 and thus began her many moves with her mother, older sister Eve and stepfather. At 8, she decided she wanted to learn to play piano so she could accompany herself singing. She began typical beginning classical piano lessons at age 9 which went on for 2 or 3 years. Though she lacked the desire to conform to her classical teacher’s lessons, she was greatly moved by music and by singing in particular. Jennifer got her first big rush of being on stage when at age 9, she performed in the school talent show singing a song from “The Muppet Show” which brought her best friend to tears. It was from this moment, that she began to embrace the idea of making music as her life dream.

At 12 Jennifer was discovered by a record producer who was convinced he would make her into the next big kid star. She worked in his studio non stop recording old cheesy pop songs. The producer would sit in the control room crying from the raw charge and emotion in her prepubesent voice. The flow of the project was interrupted by her mom’s decision to move once again to a small town in Utah. She went from a concrete, smog filled Los Angeles existence, tagging along with dad to recording sessions to the smells and sights of hay, families with 13 children and Mormon churches on every street corner.

Soon after the move, Jennifer’s mother started getting ill. Jennifer and her sister who had always carried adult responsibilities, cared for her baby siblings while her mom and stepfather visited natural health clinics. Five months later, when Jennifer just turned 13, her mother died at age 41 of leukemia. Upon the death of her mother, Jennifer moved back to Los Angeles to live with her father.

From there it was more recording with the big producer guy and his cheesy songs, school talent shows and the Hollywood nightclub showcase and audition scene. It was also at this time when Jennifer started acting, though she was not very good at it.

At 15 Jennifer left her religion. The first in her family “to see the light”, over the years the rest would follow. By this time piano had taken on a more loose, self developed approach with slower tempos being her favorite. By the time she was 17, she was craving to feel some normalcy and wished to take a break from the identity she had built around music. She went to University of California Santa Barbara and earned a high honors bachelor degree in Sociology during which time she began her love affair with long distance running. Jennifer ran 7 marathons placing 3rd in her age group in her last LA marathon race. With her boyfriend at the time she started several entrepreneur projects during college and continued teaching aerobics and soon began dancing hip hop which she still teaches. Through college Jennifer had many intense withdrawals from being away from music, but didn’t want to do back into it half way. So finally the day after her college graduation, Jennifer began writing music for the first time.

The first songs that came out were very personal. They were also very developed musically though she was ignorant of Click here to go to Cruel Pagemusic theory. She wrote many, many songs in her first year of writing and for all intensive purposes taught herself piano, developing her own beautiful strange way with harmony and dissonance. She had several bands, including “Puppet Show” and “Grizelda” while at the same time starting to play solo piano/voice concerts in a local café. Several demos later, she began making her debut Cruel - with the help of engineer Julie Last (Joni Mitchell, Ricki Lee Jones, Shawn Colvin) who co-produced and engineered half the record with her. The other songs were recorded with a local engineer which were more raw one takes. Jennifer played a bunch of shows in California as an indie artist and received some strong recognition for her raw intensity, authenticity, beautiful voice and strange, original pop songs. Chris Douridas took in Jennifer’s music featuring her on KCRW’s “Morning Becomes Eclectic”. He also felt her music should be signed to a record deal, so he played it for David Geffen who was rumored to say she was “amazing! but wow, so intense”.