Needle Drop: Poppy
Jean Crawford, “One Time Hunny”

I first caught Poppy Jean Crawford at Meows Moewzs, a revival counterculture and music shop in Pasadena, opening up for Chameleons’ frontman Mark Burgess this past summer during his intimate record store tour. Amid vintage clothing, assorted leather boots, and crates of vinyl, a petite, innocent looking young woman took a stage strewn with candles and quietly strapped her guitar across her shoulder and conjured up a mood I revere—vulnerable sensuality with just the right amount of melancholy.

In the acoustic setting, I was picking up the ethereal planes of Sharon Van Etten, although later at home, digging deeper into her catalogue, traces of PJ Harvey and psych rock rolled down like clouds visiting a mountainside, morphing my room into a dream world. I was sold.

On the cusp of turning twenty-four, I sense that Crawford is precocious beyond her years as we dive into a breakfast together at the iconic 1960s throwback Clark Street Diner in Hollywood. We cross topics on everything from our love of the movie Blonde as a feminist manifesto, Buddhist chanting, and Charles Mansion phoning her landline as a child—just the normal LA chatter.

An unconventional upbringing where creativity resides in her DNA has led Crawford to this preternatural place. It’s her mother, Casey Niccoli (director of Jane’s Addiction’s “Been Caught Stealing” and one time girlfriend of Perry Farrell), and her father, surrealist painter/musician, Shannon Crawford who’d ask her to sing background vocals on his tracks and introduced her to PJ Harvey, who have given rise to her ability to think in terms of art first.

As child she would have vivid dreams of songs and spend the day with her grandmother trying to recall them in the waking world. Growing up between LA and blue collar Bakersfield, her story isn’t one of Hollywood nepotism, rather it’s one of raw DIY talent and grit infused in her persona, writing her own melodies and lyrics and recording in her bedroom.

Crawford’s primitive, dreamlike rock ‘n’ roll music has landed her opening slots for The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Starcrawler, The Black Lips, and a brief signing to 30th Century Records, five-time Grammy winning producer Danger Mouse’s label, before it folded during the pandemic. Garnering attention with her first two EPs, “The Hallucinatory and Addictive 4 Week Love” (2016) and “JEANJEANIE” (2019)—both releases are trancelike diary expositions, and much like Bjork, exhibit the promise of a strong female in command of her own world.

Her latest release, “One Time Hunny” produced by Chris Coady and guest starring Rayla Delanova is a conceptual burlesque carnival video directed by Angela Ricciardi and Silken Weinberg at Los Angeles’ Jumbo’s Clown Room where Courtney Love was once a dancer. Behind the song are made up stories as she pretends she’s in an argument with individuals who would have to watch her strip. Even though Jumbo’s is a burlesque styled club, in an effort “not to appropriate stripper’s culture,” Crawford says she decided to work one night at a fully-nude strip club prior to shooting the video. Would she do it again, I ask her? “No,” she remarks, “I felt like I was giving a piece of myself away.”

January will see the release of a collection of music she worked on with her “dream producer,” James Dring (Blur, Gorillaz, Lana Del Rey) which takes on a new pop leaning approach, and in conjunction, a video for a new song “The Takeover” that her mom directed which won first place in the creative video category at this year’s College Media Association’s Film and Audio Festival.

There is immense beauty in the chaos of Poppy Jean Crawford’s music and, as per her Instagram bio, I’m looking forward to more “delicacy presented side by side with disorder.”

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