FOR Jana Horn, Armaggedon is never far from her thoughts. When you were raised in a Baptist household in Glen Rose, Texas – population 2,500 – the end of everything has a way of creeping into conversation.
“What you learn as a kid is so much of who you are,” she says. “I spent so much of my childhood doing Bible drills – literally drilling scripture into my head – that it’s unforgettable, however many years it’s been since I’ve gone back to those words. I’ve seen the Left Behind series and you can’t forget those scenes – people flying off to heaven leaving their clothes and underwear on the floor. I don’t seek to draw from those images, but they are just a part of my thinking process.”
Right now, Armageddon is the subject of her thesis. “In general terms, I’m writing about the end of the world,” she says, with a mischievous glint in her eye, calling from Charlottesville, Virginia, where she is studying for her MFA in fiction writing.
It won’t be the first time that Horn has taken something rooted in the Bible and turned it into art: it’s the story of “Jordan”, the first single from her debut album, . The song is a strange, sinuous and unsettling thing, whose protagonist walks in time to thudding bass from his home in Galilee to Jordan, in the midst of a spiritual crisis. With its striking imagery – a “” who orders the narrator to drop a bomb on his home and family for the sake of his beliefs – it
