About
Jessye
Jessye DeSilva seamlessly blends theatrical pop elements with traditional folk and roots music to form her piano-driven alt-americana sound.
Boston-based singer-songwriter Jessye DeSilva has been releasing music and touring nationally since 2019, earning praise from No Depression, Rolling Stone, and The Boot. Known for blending Americana roots with expansive, genre-defying songwriting, she has shared stages with Lisa Loeb, Adeem the Artist, and Brian Dunne, performed at AmericanaFest, and collaborated with artists including Jake Blount and Ellen Angelico.
She infuses hope into songs about religious alienation, mental health struggles, and societal injustice to create a uniquely queer and unholy ruckus. Jessye’s forthcoming album Glitter Up the Dark was produced by Aaron Lee Tasjan and incorporates Eighties pop and Nineties alternative flourishes to the stately Americana and country-rock sounds of 2023’s Renovations and her 2022 debut Landscapes, which earned her a nomination for Americana Artist of the Year at the 2022 Boston Music Awards.
No Depression says “Comparisons to Elton John and Brandi Carlile are easy — DeSilva clearly takes a page from these idols, anchoring [her] songs in pop melody juggernauts, gauzy textures, and vocal bravado.” Nashville Scene named her a 2023 Artist To Watch, saying “DeSilva could inject new life into a genre that could definitely use a little more pretzel logic.”
About Glitter Up the Dark
“Aaron and I came up with the idea to write an album that would center the idea of joy, in a broad sense,” says DeSilva. “Specifically, the joy of marginalized communities, queer and trans communities, and how that joy is something really powerful as a tool for resistance but also something we need for survival, and something we need to fiercely protect. That doesn’t mean every song is joyful, which speaks to the nuance of what joy means and how joy is something you have to fight and work for. Standing strong in the sense of yourself in spite of the world fighting you on that is a part of joy.”
When Jessye DeSilva first started writing songs for her third album, she could already sense all the changes. It was the summer of 2023, and DeSilva had just released her second album, the roots-Americana statement Renovations, which earned rave mentions in No Depression, Rolling Stone, and The Boot. After identifying for years as non-binary, she was beginning to think of herself as a trans woman. Meanwhile, Tennessee, where DeSilva had decamped to write her next record, had become the latest state to enact a drag ban.
So when DeSilva and Aaron Lee Tasjan, her collaborator and producer, decided to base an entire record on exploring the concept of queer joy, they couldn’t have predicted just how important the songs would end up becoming.
The album they conceived is Glitter up the Dark, an astonishing and nuanced meditation on community, memory, resistance and survival arriving at a necessary and vital time, one where DeSilva’s own identity as a trans woman is being threatened more than ever. “We wrote it for a specific moment,” DeSilva says, “but I think it was even more so meant for this moment.”
