Vanessa Daou continues her poetic and musical explorations with a new album, JOE SENT ME. Inspired by the code words that were used to get into the Speakeasies of the Prohibition era, "Joe sent me", was one of the most common ones. "It was the perfect metaphor for my new album, saying something about the transmission of ideas through time, the secret ranges of the voice, fleeting nights of love and desire, the archiving of dreams, memory, and the imagination."

Using her voice as confession and invitation, Vanessa approaches each song as though it were a secret message. The album grew out of a raw journal of notes and sketches she began after 9/11. "For me, music is a response to the world, and the voice imbues the words with life and gives them breath. I'm especially interested in the idea of recording as an act of preservation of experience. To be a recording artist is - quite literally - to make a record of sounds, voices, words, and breaths. Every record I create, I plunge into the depths of life in all aspects of experience: sound, images, dreams. Music is a time capsule, capturing, distilling and preserving the essence of what it means to be alive. The role of poetry, of words and language, is to remind us."

Vanessa Daou digs deeper into her electro-acoustic roots on JOE SENT ME, reminiscent of Zipless & Head Music, she describes this new album as "moody, bluesy, soulful, minimal, bass heavy, and rich musically." On JOE SENT ME, Jazz, Blues, Electronica and spoken word merge seamlessly, sounds and echoes from the past coexist, clash and collide: Vanessa's intention was to create "a unique sonic landscape." JOE SENT ME is a pared down and refined synthesis of the various styles Daou has explored throughout her storied career - a sonic collage of slow-burning smoky jazz, hazy Delta Blues, atmospheric electronic pop, sultry soul, melancholic neo-folk and stirring poetic meditations. The album simmers and steams, bringing to mind languid and sultry nights of love, lust and desire, reminding the listener of Vanessa Daou's previous releases while bringing a new sound into focus.

Throughout her career, Vanessa has used each album as a conceptual tool to explore the world, past, present, and imagined future.

Starting with Head Music, Vanessa's debut release on Columbia Records, a meditation on Taoist philosophy, to Zipless on MCA Records where Vanessa transforms the confessional poems of Erica Jong into songs exploring the intimate thoughts of a woman in a changing society. On Plutonium Glow Vanessa merges themes of cyberspace and outer space, using the radioactive element as an image, a force and a world of it's own. For Make You Love Vanessa uses as her guide the life of a close friend living in Paris who symbolized for Vanessa the "quintessential post-modern woman, who is both heroine and heartbreaker."

Whispered, spoken, sung, Vanessa uses the mode of a poem as both question and solution on, delving into the complexities of desire. JOE SENT ME was conceived of as a union between an private inner life and its public path through the web of technology which Vanessa wanted to "make both apparent and obscure."

Jazz has always played a prominent role in Vanessa's music, from Head Music to Dear John Coltrane, an album inspired by the life and music of John Coltrane. "Jazz music is rooted in improvisation, and because of that, it expresses both thinking and feeling. It's as much about the searching and the questioning as it is about the spirit of the music itself. Jazz is its own language - what interests me is how it can communicate on several levels at once: ideas about nationality, history, sexuality, synchronization, rebellion all come into play."

Vanessa documents her exploration of intimate realms on JOE SENT ME - tracing the trajectory of love affairs - as she conducts a technological excavation of private domains, holding emotions up to the flickering light. "In this post-9/11 world," she explains "it is to technology that we look for meaning and a sense of universal sharing. For me, the internet has aspects of the romantic, where the imagination co-mingles with information, poetry with pornography, where revelation jostles with revolution." The creation of JOE SENT ME documents the artist's navigation, a journey through this hybrid world of internal and external travels, sifting through layers of the past and present that merge, clash, and collide, where "the artist's desire is to decipher."