Jenny Owen Youngs on Revisiting "Avalanche", Buffering the Vampire Slayer, Collaboration, and the Beauty of Imperfection | The Sharp Notes Interview

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Singer-songwriter Jenny Owen Youngs has never been one to shy away from transformation. In revisiting Avalanche for its deluxe edition, she offers listeners not just a deeper look at the record but a fuller portrait of herself: one that is shaped by collaboration, reinvention, and a willingness to let imperfections breathe. For Youngs, songs aren’t just crafted; they’re lived in, layered, and continually reinterpreted. The deluxe edition reflects this ethos, blending intimate demos, reimaginings, and remixes that speak to a creative process rooted as much in community as in craft.

What emerges in conversation with Youngs is a portrait of an artist who balances vulnerability with wit and depth with disarming warmth. Throughout our chat, punctuated by laughter, storytelling, and a shared appreciation for physical media and flawed beauty, it felt more like catching up with an old friend than interviewing a seasoned professional. Her openness about the artistic process, emotional stamina, and the strange alchemy of songwriting reveals a creator unafraid to blur the lines between the personal and the universal.

Youngs is as reflective about her own journey as she is generous with her insights. Whether discussing the accidental poetry of a rain-soaked piano take, the tactile pleasures of vinyl, or the resonance of her music with listeners both young and old, she speaks with the kind of clarity that only comes from years of growth and self-inquiry. It’s a conversation about music, sure, but also about time, presence, and the strange comfort of hearing your own story echoed in someone else’s life.

ezt: It's nice to meet a fellow New Jerseyan.

joy: Yes. What is your county of origin?

ezt: My county is Passaic County.

joy: Tremendous. Glory. I hail from Sussex County, the y'all county, you know?

ezt: We're here really to talk about the deluxe version of Avalanche. I don't know if my filter is showing this. I'll edit a picture in there, but thanks for sharing that with me. We could talk a little bit about that and whatever else you'd like to talk about. Of course, you revisited this album, which is interesting because it really hasn't been out too long. Why don't you talk about your decision to do that, and what else you may have learned about the record, revisiting it for its deluxe edition?

joy: Yes. Why and whermst. [laughs] There are so many reasons to do a thing. I think that the core reason that I wanted to expand, say like, oh, dot dot dot, and also here's more of these songs, is that I think so much of my creative life between my last proper full length album and this album has been centered around collaboration, writing with other people, producing with other people. That was a big part of bringing in a lot of my frequent collaborators to either create re-imaginings of songs from the album or remixes.

It feels like very vital, I guess, to my creative process at this point. I'm constantly in collaboration with other people to make things for myself and to make things for them. Then also there's some demos and at least one at home solo recording. When I tour, sometimes I go out with a band or as a duo, but I do a lot of touring by myself. So felt exciting to also present a song in its sparest form, just so many ways to skin a song, I guess, is the thing.

Photo by Savannah Lauren

ezt: Skin a song. I like that. I've never heard that expression before.

joy: Yes, I'm not sure if my expression holds water, but let's roll with it. [laughs]

ezt: As a songwriter, I guess, it begs the question, especially since you're looking back on all these fragments and different parts and different ways of looking at the same songs. When you're writing, when you're composing, how do you know when a song is complete? How do you know it's done? How do you know you've said what you wanted to say, and you say, "Hey, this thing is done, let's start getting into the production of it."

joy: Sometimes that's something that I look to collaborators to agree with me or disagree with me on. Then sometimes there's so many great books that you can read about writing or the creative process. One that I really love is On Writing by Stephen King, where he--

ezt: I've had that book for many years. It's a great one.

joy: It's a really good one. One thing that he talks about is writing something, putting it in a drawer, and then coming back to it. He has a duration of time in mind. I have applied that to a certain degree. I need fresh ears to determine whether an idea is finished or not. I like to make a pile, get as many songs in a pile as I can. Then come back to them after some time and be like, okay, what does this feel upon listening with my fresh ears? As a listener as much as you can be objective about your own creations, do I feel like I'm getting everything that I want to get out of this? Am I experiencing everything that I meant for someone else to experience by writing this?

ezt: Ben from Jukebox the Ghost, he added some piano tracks, he worked on your album a little bit. There's this interesting little story about he's recording the piano part, and there was some rain coming down on the studio skylight, and you guys listened to that and decided to leave that in there. Is that something you do often? Do you leave these accidental moments in? What did that bring to that song, and is that something you've done before?

joy: I think more and more that's of great interest and value to me. I think I spent a lot of time earlier in my career being very focused on precision and perfection like how do we get the absolute cleanest dry? Everything super sound separation so that we can address and treat those sounds as cleanly as possible, as separately from one another as possible. I think in making Avalanche 1.0 with Josh Kaufman, I was really jumping in the deep end with him. His method of recording is very like, "You and me, we'll play the song together and you'll sing it and we'll do that like five times and then we'll take the best one. Then we'll put some other stuff on top of that."

I was like, "You want me to sing and play guitar at the same time while you also play guitar, or drums, or piano, and then we'll track stuff on that." There's no click track. All of the sort of scaffolding that I had carefully constructed and adhered to throughout many years of recording was just suddenly all gone. It was suddenly scary, it's like, there's no net. Actually, ultimately trusting in him and the process yielded, I think, recordings that breathe more easily and feel more alive as a direct result of that method.

Then I think something like the, oh, wow, it started raining in the middle of this take in Ben's studio as he's tracking piano. That to me is like the next step. It's like we're people making music where you can cultivate a sort of airtight, super pristine studio environment, but that's not the only way to record music. To my preferences in the now, I really cherish those, like being able to hear the breath, the creak of a piano pedal, all of that stuff just makes it feel more immersive to me, I think.

ezt: Have you ever listened to Glenn Gould, the piano player, the classical pianist?

joy: I should have.

ezt: Okay. Well, maybe you will after this interview, but it's funny that you mentioned that: I'm a fan of his. He was one of the greatest pianists of the '50s, '60s, '70s, and the early '80s. He made a lot of sounds while he played, and he played a lot of Bach and stuff like that. He had this chair he had to sit in, so the chair made a lot of noise, and you heard the pedaling a lot. You'd hear him humming along, doing this in the background. Here he was on Columbia Records, and he was one of the most renowned classical pianists of his day.

Yet you have all those artifacts in there, those sounds of the room, which, for me, were very interesting because it humanized a lot of that classical music as I was listening to it. It just reminded me of what you were saying, keeping some of that in there to sort of humanize this stuff. Like, say, "Hey, we're just all kind of people. It doesn't matter whatever songs we're writing or however amazing our performances." It just made me think of that.

joy: Yes. You're making me think of like-- a couple of my favorite records are the two Johnny Cash records that were recorded live in prisons. If you listen to the full albums and not whatever the radio edits or what have you have the singles, if you listen all the way through, you're hearing Johnny talk to his audience between songs. You're hearing the PA system in the prison like whatever-- if it's the cafeteria or wherever they are there's like, "This person has a visitor." It feels like you're there, which is cool.

ezt: "Johnson, please report. Johnson, come into the front," whatever he says there.

joy: Yes, exactly.

ezt: I didn't realize until the other day, I just heard that song "25 Minutes to Go". He messes up the time, and they left it in any way. They never edited. It was like it goes from like, "14 minutes to go to like 10 minutes," and he's like, "Well, I mean, 12 minutes to go." There's some moment in there where he changes it around.

joy: There's another song on one of them, I can't remember which. It's maybe like a one, five, one, five thing or one, four, one, four. He like skips a phrase and ends up starting on the four instead of starting on the one. He just follows that all the way to the end of the song. You're like, "Nice." That's how you do it in a real-life situation when your brain betrays you and you've lost track of something. You're like, "Well, we're still just going to finish the song, obviously."

ezt: Yes. Kudos to those producers for leaving that stuff in, or not like totally editing it out. I'm sure they edited this stuff like crazy anyway, but they left some of that humanity in there. That's cool. It sounds like that producer who worked with you on this album really knew how to take you out of your comfort zone. As you said, you're used to working in a structured way, but this guy was more laid back. Hey, let's just do it a little differently. That probably had a big impact on the album.

joy: Huge impact. I love Josh Kaufman. He's an unbelievable player and just really so tuned in to making the best recording possible, and that's all he's thinking about. I'm like, "Oh, no, click track? What if there's going to be a remix later?" He's like, "Could we not think about the economy of the song?" I'm like, "Dude, you're so right. That's exactly what we shouldn't be doing, thinking about the economy of the song."

ezt: What if Netflix has to use this? We need the stems to be clean. Clean stems.

joy: Exactly, yes.

ezt: As someone who's really done a lot of songwriting, and maybe you could talk a little bit about your entry into songwriting for others versus writing for yourself. With this package in mind, with the deluxe package in mind, what can younger artists, do you think, would they learn about trusting different stages of a song's life? Maybe that plays into the joke we're making about Netflix here. Obviously, you are making an album, and you do want it to be organic, you do want it to be human, but at the same time, you want it to be valuable in different venues as well. How would you explain that to someone who's sitting down to make a record?

joy: I think that at least in terms of music that you're making for yourself, for your artist's project, you cannot engineer. You cannot ensure sure that your song will be licensed. You can hope, you can pray. There are some licensing avenues that you could potentially aim towards. Anybody who does a lot of sync writing can tell you the zones, the themes, the stuff that they tend to write, or the production techniques that they tend to use because they know what is often being looked for in that world.

If you are an artist making a record, the best thing I think that you can do for yourself is to write songs that make you feel something. Perform them the way that feels authentic to you and record them the way that you think they sound awesome. I think that making music that you love is actually a much better way to potentially have other people hear your music, whether it is because it's getting licensed or getting added to a playlist or getting picked up at radio, being worked to radio, or what have you. I think that the line between craft and trying too hard can be easy to stumble over. You know what I mean?

ezt: Sure. Well, it reminds me of a lot of these artists who their first album is stuff that they wrote in their bedroom or growing up, and stuff they were really passionate about. Then on the second or third or fourth album, they have to re-engineer that stuff, and it's not necessarily as sincere as it was in the beginning. Or they're trying to please a certain audience, or they're trying to get on a Netflix show or something, when really all they should be doing is just being themselves.

joy: I think that there's only one you. You know what I mean? You're the only person who's having the exact combination of ideas that you're currently having in your skull. Nobody could replace you. Why not do you make your music instead of trying to make Taylor Swift's music or whoever?

ezt: You're right, darn it. Thank you for reminding me of that!

joy: [laughs] I think we all need a reminder now and then to be ourselves, if we can manage to do that.

ezt: Well, absolutely. We take ourselves for granted. "Well, it's just me. These are my dumb ideas and my dumb thoughts, and who would care?" People forget that that is you. We're all authentic humans with little--even though we group together, we see things in slightly different ways, and we have our own little fingerprints.

joy: Yes, 100%.

ezt: As music becomes digital and maybe even a little disposable, I just showed your record is, of course, out on vinyl. You have physical product here. How important is that tangible product to you? Is that something that you connect with, or is it something that you're a little indifferent about because you're of an age that maybe is more connected with digital media? How do you feel about that? Does it make a difference to you?

joy: I'm a Luddite. I love physical objects, artifacts, ancient tomes: records.

ezt: Especially tomes, especially tomes.

joy: Yes. I want the physical thing, and I want to make the physical thing, for sure. A record cover is one square inch on a screen, or a record cover is 12 by 12. A 12 by 12 would be my pick.

ezt: Well, mine too. You can see all my junk behind me. I love my stuff, but every once in a while, I say to myself, "What are we doing? Do we need this stuff? Is this just some kind of fetishization, or should we just be clean and keep everything on a small device, and then we can hear everything and not have everything collecting dust?" Obviously, I see the value, I'm just arguing with myself.

joy: Yes. [laughs] I might be making this case to the wrong person based on the unbelievable amount of records behind you.

ezt: The tomes, the many tomes behind me.

joy: [chuckles] I like to buy records that are important to me, and then also stream those same records for both convenience and streaming income for those bands. You know what I mean?

ezt: Yes.

joy: Buy the record once, and then stream it in perpetuity. Then all of the funds and all of the portability when you need it, it all works together. I don't know if that's-- [laughs] like I said, if you were following that path, man, that's a lot of records to be very, very, very important.

ezt: Well, they are. I've been doing it since I was a really little person, a little kid. They came with me on the travels. Do you have a big collection yourself, or are you a vinyl person, or books, or what have you got? You got a big collection of anything?

joy: All I would say is that in my house, there are too many guitars, probably too many books, and the ratio of unread to read books would just make your skin crawl. It's not right.

ezt: That's interesting. I saw a funny thing just the other day. It said, "There are two different hobbies. The first is buying records, and the second is listening to records." I guess that goes for books, too. You can either buy a lot of books or read a lot of books. It's not always the same person.

joy: Yes. I aspire to read all of the books. Let it one day be so. Fortunately, I'm thrilled to report that I have a toddler, and he's awesome and I love him.

ezt: Congrats.

joy: However, say since he was born, I have finished exactly two adult books. I've read about a million books for him, which has been a true joy, but I would like to read more than one book a year on average for myself.

ezt: Right, right. It's not easy. It's not easy to sit down and do that. I sympathize with you. Of course, we're talking a little bit about revisiting an album that was already out. Some of these songs are very emotional. Some of them are very emotional. I think about musicians like Elliott Smith, and I know you're a fan of his. I have to be careful with him sometimes. I can only listen to him for like four songs. Then I have to get out of it. What's it like emotionally to you to revisit this stuff? Do you play things over? Does it bring you back to a place in a time, or have you just made peace with it and you're looking at it with a little more distance?

joy: I think that it's funny, most of the songs on the record are on the much newer side. A few of the songs I wrote in 2013, 2014, 2015, where I had just put out a record, and then I was still writing. I was like, "Okay, this will be for the next record," and then the next record didn't happen for quite some time. There are these songs of my former self, considerably former self, that we're waiting to have a home on a record. Weirdly, those songs, the oldest ones are the ones that catch me off guard if I'm playing them at a show or something. They're the ones that I'll be like, "Oh, whoa, hey-I was not expecting. I did not agree to you this particular emotional reaction at this exact time." It's weird. Songs are weird. Feelings are weird. Making a life out of your life, you know what I mean? Here are some various parts of me, some bits and bobs, some items from my personal collection. Then they're also theoretically for public consumption and also public performance by me, which was my idea, and then I'm like, "Whoa. Hey--"

ezt: What's going on here? What's going on here?

joy: Exactly.

ezt: What about the reaction from other people? Again, back to your songwriting, a lot of it feels very you, it feels like experiences that you've had. They're vivid and they seem specific to you. What have you heard from fans or listeners, how do people react to your tunes? Have you been surprised by the reaction of someone to your music or something like that?

joy: I think that it's been a joy to share these songs with people. It's quite common for me to spend a good deal of time at the merge table at the end of the night talking with folks. They want to share their stories, and I really value and cherish that, their vulnerability. I feel like they experience my vulnerability and they're like, "This is a safe place where I can share my vulnerability or explain the events of my life that make this song resonate with me in a particular way." It will never stop amazing me that anyone has heard anything I do, and will be like, "Wow, that meant something to me." I feel like-- I don't know. I feel like A, I haven't exactly answered your question, but--

ezt: No, you're there. You're there. I think your music will elicit an emotional response from a person who's really listening and a person who's open to overlaying your music on their experience. It may be emotionally exhausting to hear the feedback from people, though. Maybe.

joy: I think being a person is emotionally exhausting. Any way that you slice it. What am I trying to say? That it's not any more emotionally exhausting than just existing all the time. I want to clarify that I'm not trying to put a negative spin on emotional exhaustion either. Picture this. You're at the beach, you're there all day, you're sweating. The sun is cooking you. You're in the water, and it gets to be lunchtime, and you're hungrier than you've ever been in your life. You're like, "Whoa, I am so rung out and I've only been out here for three or four hours."

There's something about the sun and the sea and the sand that just really tuckers you out, rings you out. I feel like you'll never sleep better than later that night. Maybe this is the catharsis of music. One reason that music is valuable is that you can take something in, overlay your own experience over it, react to it however you react to it. Then, in my greatest imaginings, it has moved the needle a tiny bit. Has changed your brain a little bit or made you either see something in your life a little bit differently or feel seen a little bit.

I feel like there was one other thing that I wanted to say, which is-- for example, the other day I was playing in Vienna, Virginia, and I was running around before stage, and I happened to see that there was a couple and they were there with their daughter who was four. I was like, "What is up? Let's high-five. Hold on, I'm so excited." Now that I have a toddler, I'm like, "Whoa, a 4-year-old wanted--?" "He's here on purpose? I'm so excited."

ezt: Sure.

joy: I was like, "Hey, what's up? how you doing?" Her mom was like, "Do you want to tell Jenny what your favorite song is?" I was like, "You have a favorite song of mine? How did I ever get so lucky?" The little girl was like, "Yes. My favorite song is 'Salt'," which is like the-- what does it have? It's a song on Avalanche that has putting someone into hospice, realizing that you might need to end a relationship. There is a lot of really intense stuff in that song. When a fresh-faced 4-year-old who does not yet know the crushing pain of existence is like, "This is something I'd like to listen to, please," it spins you a little bit. You're like, "Whoa, this 4-year-old knows things that I don't know any more or yet."

ezt: It's also an affirmation that your compositions can be received on different levels of the human experience. That's what music, or great art, or great books, or movies are all about. You've created something that a 4-year-old could appreciate, and you've created something that an 80-year-old person could appreciate. It's just different contexts there.

joy: Music is cool.

ezt: Isn't it cool?

joy: Art is cool.

ezt: It's weird and cool.

joy: Unbelievable.

ezt: Tell me a little bit about how you got into the songwriting with others. I know I sort of glanced on that a little earlier, but a lot of songwriters think about, "Well, I'm going to support myself, and I'm going to play about myself, and write songs about me, and share stories about me." How did you make the leap or that transition into saying, "Hey, I'm going to really collaborate," which seems important to you. How did you go in that direction? How did you find your way there?

joy: I had just put out my third record and done the big loop around the US a couple of times and was getting to the point where it was time to think about, what is the next thing? I was like, "Man, I'm so tuckered out of driving a van in a huge loop. I wonder if there's anything more." I was working at that time with a manager who was managing a client who had had great success in the songwriting world. He was like, "This has been really great for my other client. Maybe I think it's something you could be good at."

At the time I was like, "Ugh, yuck. That would be admitting defeat." That's what my brain immediately did. I was like, "That would be giving up, and admitting failure," and whatever. Wild to look back and realize that that was the shape of my brain at that time. Now I'm in a completely different place. At the time, I was digging my heels in, but then I was like, "Oh, I'll try it. I'll try it to prove to you that this is maybe not the best idea." I started taking trips to Los Angeles to do writing sessions and was having a lot of fun. I was like, "Oh. Oh, okay. This isn't so bad."

ezt: It's not so bad...

joy: "I'm making new friends, and thinking about musical ideas every day, and that's actually cool and fun." I just started doing it more and more, and I was going to LA more and more. Finally, I was like, "I'm going to LA so much, I might as well just move there and just see what happens." Most of my music friends from New York had already moved to Los Angeles, so I was like, "They're all there anyway. I'll just go there and really commit to doing writing sessions and just see what happens." I just kept doing it and just kept having more and more fun.

ezt: You opened yourself up.

joy: Yes, which is hard to do, I think, for a lot of people, but can be really, really valuable and rewarding. There was a lot to learn. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out, "How do I do this instead of writing songs for me?" Gradually, over time, little by little, the lesson I kept learning in micro-doses is, "You don't. You have to be yourself in those situations, too."

ezt: True. Interesting.

joy: When you listen to a song, you don't want to have the experience of being able to hear that someone wrote a song. You know what I mean?

ezt: Yes.

joy: You want to have an emotional human experience. You want to feel something.

ezt: It reminds me of an AI poem: (robotically): "This is a poem about a flower."

joy: Exactly. It's like, "Whoa, uncanny valley stuff." For me, there was a big process of trying to figure out how to squash my impulse to be a capital S songwriter and just show up as me. I feel the more I was able to do that, the even more fun I had and the even better songs that were coming out of the sessions. That's what I can tell you.

ezt: It's weird too that you take your own personal experiences, your own fingerprint of experiences, and then fuse it with someone else's fingerprint of experiences, and then you create this other offspring composition. It's a funny thing that you touched on that even as someone who's writing with someone else, you still have to be yourself.

joy: Yes. I think that it's hard to do. I can't speak to everyone's experience. I work with a publishing team that's amazing. Their whole deal is like, "We want to put two or three people in a room together who are going to leave being like, I had fun today. I had a blast."

There doesn't need to be a smasharoo coming out of the room, and you don't even have to work together anymore. They want people who are going to have fun together and enjoy one another's company coming together to see if there's writing chemistry. I've heard a lot of horror stories-- horror, I guess, is strong.

I've heard a lot of stories from people who get to town and just get put into these situations with collaborators who don't sound like a lot of fun. I know that it can go poorly, [laughs] but I'm very lucky to say that has not been my experience. I've just met a lot of lovely people and had fun making things with them, and also learned so much about other people's writing processes and other people's production approaches. All of those things have informed me over time. My inner library has expanded exponentially because I've gotten to see how everybody else's brains work, which is so cool.

ezt: You're, of course, aside from just being a musician, you've had quite a great deal of success with podcasting. I wonder, how do your podcasting and your songwriting lives inform each other? Do you think of them both as narrative work, just maybe in different formats? Do you think about that with the podcasting, too?

joy: It's interesting. There are two components that I want to touch on, which is like-- so my main podcasting work has been and continues to be a show called Buffering the Vampire Slayer, which is a podcast about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, if you can believe it. We're pretty much just entering our second watch of Season 2. We're doing the whole podcast a second time. The first time we went through, I wrote a song for every single episode of Buffy-

ezt: Wow.

joy: -which is just an unhinged thing to do, but I committed early and had a lot of fun. I think that that body of songs, that 160 songs has its own narrative thing. It literally follows a seven-season arc of a television show and a cast of characters and their personal and public battles, struggles, peaks and valleys, all of that stuff. Actually, now that I'm saying this, I'm like, "Oh, yes, the podcast does have a narrative." In addition to that song through-line, my cohost and I just released a book last month about making the entire seven-season run the first iteration of the podcast together.

When we began the podcast, we were married to each other, and then in the middle we got divorced, and then we found a way to keep making the podcast. It was so important to both of us to make the podcast that we [laughs] really put ourselves through the emotional ringer to be able to do that. While we were doing that, we kept experiencing all of these weird moments where we'd be at a place in the show that would somehow line up with that moment in our life. Perhaps the narrative [laughs] created itself.

What I really think about when I think about the podcast and what I have long thought about when I think about my music, like Jenny music, is community. When we started making the podcast, we were so blessed and lucky to have listeners finding us, but what was so much more magical is that they were finding each other. We have accumulated stories over the last nine years of people finding each other through the podcast and getting married. Finding each other through the podcast and becoming best friends. People in the listenership helping other people in the listenership.

We have a sort of umbrella Facebook group, and then all of our listeners create subgroups as they see fit. There was one subgroup called "Scooby Support", where if somebody is having a bad day, if they lost a job, if they had a breakup, if they had to put their cat to sleep. If they are going through something, whoever is geographically closest to them will take up a collection on the side from anybody else who can give, put together a care package for them, drive it to their house, and leave it on their porch. That's the kind of stuff that these people are doing, which is so amazing.

ezt: Yes. There's hope for us all, maybe.

joy: This is what I'm saying, there's hope for us all. We are just like, "We want to make a podcast about the show that we love. What's so amazing is that people have joined us and found one another and built this very beautiful like some IRL, but a lot of digital connection community and they support each other and it's so beautiful. I see that to some degree as well on the music side of people who have found each other through my music. It's just so bonkers. I will return to the thesis of our chat, which is, music is cool.

ezt: Weird, [laughs] right?

joy: Weird.

ezt: Music is cool and weird. Well, it's interesting because it's hard to even-- I think you can build a larger community doing almost the podcasting. I don't mean you, I just mean in general, it's different than even music. Music is known, obviously, as a communal thing and people gather around. There is something about that conversation that you start with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and you say, "Well, this is an interesting starting point." It's where else it goes and what it means from there. That's interesting to think about communally.

joy: Absolutely. I think that a song is a song, and you know what happens in the song, right?

ezt: Yes.

joy: You get up on stage and you play a bunch of songs, and then you go home. As you say, if you're tapping into an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or any show, there's going to be countless offshoots, like side quests that you can go on over the course of a conversation about that episode. It's like a million. We're constantly wondering aloud on the podcast like, "Oh, Buffy just threw a piece of glass across a room and severed this evil mystical glove off of someone's body."

They had just put on this mystical glove, and she throws this glass and severs their forearm, and then the glove is separated from them, as is their forearm. RIP their forearm. We're like, "Oh, I wonder how much for--" or like, "Is that possible?" Whatever. We get a three-page email from someone uniquely qualified.

This happens without fail whenever we have a question, but it's like, "Here is how I got to all of my math. Here is the formula you need. Here is my estimate of the thickness of the glass. My estimate of the distance across the room, how velocity is impacted by travelling across. If Buffy can throw a piece of glass as fast as the fastest pitcher on earth, here's what that speed would be." All of this stuff leading to-- [laughs] also, not that this is leading to world peace, but it is amazing.

ezt: It's better than a lot of other things.

joy: Yes. [laughs]

ezt: Absolutely.

joy: Maybe it is leading to world peace. I'm not going to come down firmly and say that it's not.

ezt: Yes. Don't downplay it. Absolutely not. You've got the podcast. You're revisiting the album. What's next? What's next on deck for you that you're able to talk about?

joy: Oh my goodness. I'm just starting to get that album itch, you know?

ezt: Yes.

joy: In between Avalanche 1.0 coming out and now I've played a bunch of shows, which I wasn't doing for a long time, did some touring, wrote a book, released a book, bunch of podcasts, that I was cooking all of that. I'm like, "Okay. Now, I have just a tiny little bit of spare space in my brain." I'm like, "Let's go with a record." I'm working on a little science fiction project that is both musical and narrative. That's as much as I can say about it at this exact moment, but I am immersed in that. Just on our second tour through the Buffyverse. For the next six years, [laughs] we'll be doing that.

ezt: Sounds like a plan.

joy: I'm going for it. [laughter]

ezt: Go for it. Jenny Owen Youngs, you're such a talented songwriter. This has been a real treat to talk to you. This is a really fun conversation. I really appreciate the time that you spent with me today. Thank you so much.

joy: I had a blast. Thank you so much for having me.