Strawberry Hands Dreams of Water on Elemental New Album A Jazz Blessing for the Animal
By : Josh Kitchen / September 18, 2026
Every time I listen to Strawberry Hands’ new album, A Jazz Blessing for the Animal, I feel like I’ve come out of a different dream. Like a reflection in a river or pool, there’s much to glean from the latest project from Strawberry Hands, the stage name of Philadelphia multi-artist Jacob Brunner, both intentionally and perhaps not. What keeps me coming back is how the record seems to change and evolve with each listen. Tracks like album opener “Nuda Aria Pissant” or the Ikkyū Sōjun-inspired “Dream of Water” are layered lyrically and sonically, a barrage of loops, guitars, and Brunner’s haunting voice strewn across ambient, textured strums and crashing drums.
Listening to the record, I noticed how often water appears, both literally in a song like “Dream of Water” and in references to oceans, fish, rivers, and sails elsewhere. Maybe it’s a subconscious nod to the life-giving powers of water, but I hear themes of absolution and renewal throughout. Talking to Brunner, you get the sense that he’s okay with that interpretation of the music, whether it came subconsciously or was front of mind. “I think water has a lot of spiritual significance that comes up in philosophical metaphors and religious symbolism,” he told me.
So much of A Jazz Blessing for the Animal is interested in chance and surrender, but also agency—in being human, being an animal, and being of this natural world. Brunner pulls inspiration from everywhere, whether it’s the life and philosophy of the aforementioned horny Zen Buddhist poet Ikkyū Sōjun, a tiny production choice on a Kanye West song, or simply something strange he encounters out in the wild. The record doesn’t always ask you to understand these things as much as it asks you to at least engage with them somehow. I talked to Brunner about finding art in the signs around us, the difference between being influenced by something and sounding like it, communing with the world around you, the watery world of A Jazz Blessing for the Animal, and the delicate dance between surrender and control.
I’ve listened to this record several times, and I can’t help but feel like every time I listen to it, I come out of a different dream. There’s so much in the record that may not necessarily be open to interpretation, but there’s enough there that I think you can glean what you want from it in certain ways. Multiple listenings are very rewarding for that reason.
Jacob:
Thank you for engaging with the record and giving it multiple listens. I do feel like my music is dense and very layered, and it lends itself to repeat listens, both in terms of the meaning of the lyrics and the themes, but also the musical depth and arrangement. I think the variety of textures is revealed with repeat listens.
I would consider myself very much an album-oriented artist, and I think a lot about sequencing. I think a lot about the cohesive story of an album. I think very filmically about record-making and how edits, sequences, different juxtapositions, and different permutations of the same songs change the context—how one song will sound in relation to other songs and things like that. So that’s very important to me. I’m happy to hear that you’re having that experience of having things revealed over time.
But I think, as an artist, I’m also very interested in multiple meanings and the idea that meaning is co-created with the listener, and that different people will have different interpretations. They may even misunderstand what I’m singing in interesting ways, and I’m open to that because a big part of my creative practice—and this does tie into the album title and the philosophy of the record as a whole—is based on chance. Sort of chance encounters with things that you didn’t necessarily come up with yourself, or you did not see as being fodder for lyrics. But if you are open to the signs around you, you can see art everywhere, or the potential for art. It just depends on how you frame it and interpret it.
The album title itself was actually a text that I got from a friend, my friend Sherie. She and I have a lot of back-and-forth because we’re very interested in spoonerisms and language games. We play around with funny things that we hear and things taken out of context. She had driven by a church marquee that said something to that effect—“free blessings for the animal,” or it might have even said “jazz blessing.” I can’t remember the original text, but it was something very similar to what the album title became.
So then it became a question of constructing a meaning, or reverse-engineering a meaning, from that phrase. I don’t know what it means when I hear it, but the fun is that I get to decide what it means, and then it generates different possibilities. My interpretations of what that phrase might mean then give me creative ideas.
I interpreted “jazz,” in that case, as meaning something like play or chance. It’s related to improvisation. So it felt to me related to this idea that there are mysteries and uncertainties at play in the creative process, just as there are in life, and to always be doing a dance with chance and contingency and uncertainty while also imposing some order, taking your craft seriously, and thinking a lot about structure. The balance of those two things is important to me in my art.
Over the course of making this album, it became clear to me that the process of becoming yourself as an artist really parallels the process of becoming who you are as a person. Both involve some kind of delicate dance between order and disorder, and surrender and control.
I love hearing you talk about those ideas because, as a listener, there’s this instinct to ask about musical influences: “Who influenced you? Do you like the Beatles?” But the more I’ve written and talked about music, the more interested I’ve become in the other things that influence an artist. Did you go on a walk with your partner and see a weird dog? Did a street name remind you of a childhood experience? Did you smell the jasmine? Those things can be much more revealing, and hearing you talk about them adds to the layers that make this record so rewarding.
Jacob:
What you’re saying really resonates. I do think non-musical influences are really important. Things I read—I get as much from whatever ideas are kicking around in my head based on what I’m reading or what I’m watching as I do from what I’m listening to.
In fact, when I’m working on a record, if I’m being totally honest, I might not even be listening to that much music because I’m spending so much energy considering my own record. It’s like a filmmaker. They’re editing a film all day, 10 hours looking at scenes in the cutting room, and then you go home. Are you going to fire up a movie at the end of the day? Probably not, right?
So it’s not like I’m in a total vacuum and not listening during the making of a record, but the point is that I’m open to many different influences. Also, there’s something that I think is generally under-discussed in music journalism, so I’m very happy to hear you say this: There’s a big difference between influence and sounding like something.
There are things that I’m influenced by musically that nobody would ever associate with my music. It could be the most minor thing that somebody did in a mix on one song that could not be more stylistically different from what Strawberry Hands sounds like.
I’ll give you one example. I would consider myself very influenced by Kanye West, which is obviously now a somewhat shameful thing to admit. Whatever the caveats of who he is as a person aside, there’s that song “New Slaves,” where there’s that really wild shift at the end of the song toward that really lush outro sample, with, I think, Frank Ocean singing over top of it. It’s these really beautiful strings, and it’s such a cathartic emotional payoff.
But what makes it so interesting is that it happens after the entire song, which has a very sparse and icy arrangement. There’s lots of space, and it’s very cold emotionally. That’s an insane thing to do, but that’s the kind of thing that a really genius artist might do—something that you would never think to do.
When I see people do that, it’s almost like they’re giving me permission to do things that, if I were working alone, I wouldn’t have the confidence to say, “I’m just going to do this and live with the results.”
That’s kind of what I’m saying: This record, and life in general, is a process of developing more risk tolerance and just being like, “I’m just going to do this, and it might be wrong, but if it works, it’s really going to work.” There are many things like that in music that I hear where I’m like, “I’m going to do that,” but in a way that sounds completely different from Kanye.
That’s what’s so exciting. Even on the lead single, “Dream of Water,” you pull from Ikkyū Sōjun. I was reading more about him, and I love that he was this Zen Buddhist who also just loved to fuck—he was a horny guy. It’s funny to joke about, but what’s interesting about the way you interpolate that into the record is that it’s about so much more than sex. It’s about giving in to those natural, animalistic tendencies we all have and how surrendering to them can allow you to commune more intensely with the world around you. There’s something familiar about that idea, like these are experiences and feelings I’ve encountered before, even if I’ve never heard them expressed quite this way.
Jacob:
Yeah. I definitely hope that some of the experiences and the lyrics are relatable. I do think that, at times, my lyrics can tend toward abstraction, and it can get a bit esoteric. I don’t mean that in a pretentious sense, like it is beyond people’s understanding. It’s just that I go deep on some stuff that I’ve been thinking hard about, and I’m not necessarily always thinking about how to convey it in a way that is super clear.
Clarity in lyrics isn’t something to sneer at, but I do think that sometimes we give primacy to conceptual understanding and something that you can grasp very clearly in a way that we actually don’t demand of other art forms—or, if we do, we’re kind of missing the point.
If you go and look at an abstract painting and you’re like, “Well, I think that’s a lobster and that’s a star,” that’s not really what they’re doing. You’re approaching it from the wrong frame of mind. You’re asking it to be something that it’s not.
So I’m interested in things that maybe make emotional sense more than they make logical sense. But there are also ideas in the album and in my project as a whole. There is a philosophical throughline in the work that is largely about many different themes, but one of them is this idea of sensuous communion with the world as a spiritual experience, as a healthy expression of the life force.
There’s really not that big of a difference between a religious rite and a long session of fucking. But not just in a hedonistic sense. It’s not just like, “Oh, sex and fucking feel so good.” There is a deeper meaning to it, and I think that’s what Ikkyū was getting at.
He’s been interpreted as this trickster, which he was, but I think to only note his irreverence and the irony and shock value of having this religious figure also being this pervert is actually to apply the wrong frame. It would be easy to point out the contradiction, but I think the whole point is that, in a non-dualistic sense, it isn’t a contradiction.
I think that’s his whole vibe: I’m not a bad boy because what I’m doing isn’t bad. So if you treat it as totally transgressive, you’re actually applying a normal sort of morality to it, where there’s good behavior and bad behavior. But in the deepest Buddhist sense, the distinctions between those would actually collapse.
I think it’s about being human in that way, being of this natural world. You mentioned that the lyrics aren’t all literal, but there are throughlines, and I noticed how often water appears: oceans, fish, salmon, ships, oysters, rivers, sails. It made me think of Nick Cave’s “Night Raid” on Ghosteen, where he describes his wife Susie as a body of water as they’re lying together in a New Orleans hotel bed. There’s something about that fluidity and natural imagery that feels connected to what you’re exploring here, at least in how I’m reading it.
Jacob:
That’s a good catch. Even when you said that, I didn’t realize how much it’s coming up, but it makes sense because, like you said, water is flowing. I think water has a lot of spiritual significance that comes up in philosophical metaphors and religious symbolism.
It’s a very symbolically potent thing, and it makes sense because it’s so universal.
The things that I think of when I think of water are that it is ever-changing, right? So it’s a very potent metaphor for impermanence and flux. There was—I forget who said it; I’m too fried from work to remember the name of the philosopher. Maybe it was Heraclitus, who’s the guy who said, “You can’t step in the same river twice,” or something. Then it was said that a student of his said, “You can’t even step in the same river once.” There’s stuff like that, but then water is also obviously very tied into sex and sensuality—fluids. I don’t have to spell that out. That’s fairly clear.
But then also, in Jung, water represents the unconscious. So there’s a lot of plumbing the depths and what is below the surface, what we can’t see in the dark ocean. Then also in Freud, there’s this idea of the “oceanic feeling,” of coming back to the womb, of not being separate anymore. The desire to merge with everything again—he describes that as the oceanic feeling.
So water is definitely present for all of us symbolically, just as part of the collective unconscious. But yeah, definitely in my work, it does come up a lot. Even now that you mention it, I’m thinking of other records and older songs where that’s a thing.
Josh Kitchen:
What’s a track that you’re really excited for people to hear?
Jacob:
Hmm. I want to choose carefully.
If I can give my opinion, I’m excited for people to hear “Song of Descent.”
Jacob:
That’s cool. I’m very happy with that one too. That was actually the first song that I wrote for the record, and it was the first video that I finished for it. I did a video for it like a year ago, well in advance, so I knew for sure that that one had sort of thesis-statement energy.
But the one I’m probably most excited about, I guess, is “What Plant Jumps Over Me.” For me, it’s the song on the record that, if somebody was like, “Take one song that could represent what I’m trying to do and what the record does at its best,” I think it’s all kind of contained in that song because it has those unexpected juxtapositions in it.
It has this very intensely binary form, with the verses and the choruses being so texturally and tonally different, and different in tempo also. But the way that the form and the content are in conversation with each other is something that I’ve really tried to develop as an artist, and I think that song does that well.
Among different things, it is ultimately a song about being bipolar, which I’m comfortable talking about. I’m bipolar type one, and it’s not a tragedy. I mean, it’s a difficult thing to deal with, but it’s just a part of who I am. It’s something I have to manage.
The binary form is meant to convey these intense states, and I think the lyrics also do that in that song because the verses are written in a way where they’re kind of breathlessly jammed. The end of one line will then become the first word of the next line. So it has this feeling where I’m being sped up and I can’t—it’s almost like the ideas are coming out faster than I can communicate them.
Then the chorus, which I guess would be like the depressed phase, has lots of these heavy questions. All of the questions are tied together by this feeling of what a burden it is to be conscious.
“Don’t fucking tell me the hero is dead, because I can’t.”
Jacob:
Yeah. I’m not ready. I’m not ready to be the hero. I’m still on the hero’s journey. Maybe on the journey toward becoming a hero.
But even the question “What plant jumps over me?”—that’s another thing, by the way, that was found in the wild and then had to be reinterpreted. That was actually written on the bedroom wall of my friend Jim Strong, a founding member of the band and a really close friend and collaborator of mine.
I was like, “What the hell is that?” I don’t know what that means, but that’s a very evocative phrase. So then it became my task to interpret that. It’s like reading the signs. It’s kind of divining what that could possibly mean and letting that be the jumping-off point.
For me, it was like, well, obviously a plant can’t jump over a person, but it seems like there’s a kind of agony in the question of, “Why am I the one that has to act? Why am I the jumper? Who’s going to jump over me? Who’s going to play me like a piano? Why do I have to play the piano?”
So it’s all about this burden of agency, but also, without that burden, there are no gifts of agency either. You can’t have one without the other. I’d say it’s a pretty good deal overall.
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