Jessye DeSilva Announces New Album Glitter Up the Dark

About the Album

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.”

Jessye Desilva has been releasing music and touring since 2019. Over the past six years,  the Boston-based singer-songwriter has opened for everyone from Lisa Loeb to Adeem the Artist to Brian Dunne, played showcases at AmericanaFest, and collaborated with roots luminaries like Jake Blount and Ellen Angelico. 

Organized around a unifying principle, her forthcoming album, produced by Tasjan, is her most fully-realized statement, featuring appearances from Butch Walker, Adia Victoria and Lafemmebear.

“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.”

As DeSilva started to more fully embrace her identity as a trans woman, she also opened herself up to parts of her musical past she’d been more hesitant to express on her previous, more strictly-Americana records: Tori Amos, Nineties alternative, Stevie Nicks, emo, Lilith Fair era songwriters like Sarah Mchlaughlin and Paula Cole. Glitter up the Darkshows off DeSilva’s sonic breadth as an arranger, songwriter, and vocalist unencumbered by genre, from the  surging Nineties-inspired rocker “Punk Rock Joy” featuring Butch Walker to the alt-pop of “Jar of Fireflies” to the Quiet Storm ballad “Forever in Drag.” Like the book by the author Sasha Geffen that inspired its title, Glitter up the Dark is a treatise on the way entire genres and styles of music can gain new levels of power and meaning when seen through the prism of queerness and gender fluidity. 

And just as parts of DeSilva’s musical past kept resurfacing in this moment of reinvention and self-discovery, so too did memories and people from her adolescence. Some of the album’s most affecting moments are odes to places and people from DeSilva’s past. “Comrades in Arms” is a lovely folk-rock reflection on DeSilva’s days of fleeing to suburban VFW punk shows as a teenager written shortly after reconnecting with a high school friend she hadn’t seen in decades. 

The title track, meanwhile, is an eighties-inspired pop-rock ode to a late friend and former partner of DeSilva’s that doubles as a meditation on “queer resilience in the face of trauma and abuse and oppression and alienation.” The subject of the song lived near DeSilva in South Jersey and was the first out queer person DeSilva ever knew as a kid. 

“A lot of these memories from adolescence were these moments where I stepped up and started to touch what it felt like to feel free,” says DeSilva. “For where I was in my life at the time, and what I felt ready and able to acknowledge, those were the freest times I felt. Now I’m going back and making friends with that version of myself and saying to her, ‘Now you can do that; You can let go and let it all hang out.”

Glitter up the Dark is the sound of DeSilva having that conversation with her past, current and future self. Arriving at a time when Americans’ right to have that conversation with themself is being taken away, when gender expression and queer identity is being outright criminalized, the conversation that DeSilva documents in the hooks, stories and songs of her latest work has never felt more vital or necessary. 

And just as DeSilva herself spent her adolescence connecting with songs sung by those with different life experiences, whether from the cis women of Lilith Fair or the straight men singing in the VFW punk shuiows, so, too, will the songs of Glitter up the Dark resonate with anyone interested in hearing the story of an artist who’s fully discovered what it means to be herself. 

“I think music is universal,” says DeSilva, “and I think that the trans experience and the queer experience is also universal.”

Glitter Up the Dark tracklist

1. The Real

2. Comrades in Arms

3. Punk Rock Joy (feat. Butch Walker)

4. Glitter Up the Dark

5. Forever in Drag 

6. Fringe (feat. LaFemmeBear) 

7. Jar of Fireflies

8. Life on Earth 

9. Love on the Road

10. Eldritch (feat. Adia Victoria and Butch Walker)

Follow Jessye DeSilva 

Website - Instagram  - Threads

Photographer Credit: Adam S Gurczak (Almanak Creative)

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For more information please contact

Jessye DeSilva, jessyedesilvamusic@gmail.com