Jessye DeSilva -- Renovations
Jessye DeSilva lays all the cards on the table on Renovations. The nonbinary singer-songwriter’s sophomore effort swirls with passion, a panoramic album that details DeSilva’s anger and exhaustion with constantly pushing against constraints – those imposed by society and by themself. If country music is for heartbreak, DeSilva is as country as they come.
The album’s first half channels DeSilva’s early folk rock influences, a refuge from their conservative rural New Jersey upbringing (listen to episode 1 of the Rainbow Rodeo podcast for more details!) “Dysphoria,” the opening track, is an anthem for all trans people – less a meditation on how it feels to have dysphoria, and more a protest against the way of life that causes it. Gender dysphoria, the song illustrates, is not a state of mind: it’s a social condition.
This thesis advances DeSilva’s further reflections on their depression and anxiety. While these are heavy subjects, DeSilva enfolds these songs with their characteristic warmth. Songs like “Proud and Lonely” and “Fall From Grace” become lullabies in their capable hands. The album crescendos with “Renovations,” a song that marries DeSilva’s inner doubts and unease in their environment. “What I Know is True” serves as a response: that moment of resolve when it’s time to begin living the self you want to be.
DeSilva is transcendent when they target the forces holding them back: white supremacy and a narrow-minded understanding of Christianity. As they explain in the cinematic “Sundays,” their father was an evangelical minister, with the church showing Jessye the many ways they were wrong, playing piano becoming an instrument of conformity – but, now, liberation. When DeSilva enters those hymnal falsetto, the music takes flight.
Their hard-learned truths in “Let It Burn” and “Firecracker” rouse us to pride and defiance. I’m writing this on my big gay honeymoon on a train gliding through Southern Spain. I’ve spent days wandering through majestic cathedrals and the remnants of desecrated mosques and synagogues, silver extracted from the earth by enslaved indigenous people. In the countryside, you can’t walk for ten minutes without coming across a tumble of medieval or Roman bricks, thousands of years of pottery sherds scattered across the ground: constant reminders that Christianity is just a blip on the radar. The American Dream began here, but it could only run rampant on the seeming tabula rasa of the “New” World (it was in Spain that the Church put the question of whether or not indigenous people are human on trial) where Europeans had no reminders that another life was possible, or desirable.
Strident, vulnerable, thoughtful, or joyful, DeSilva uses Renovations not just to consider how to rebuild themselves from the ground up, but asks us how to do the same for ourselves and everywhere else: how to build a life that we can fit in, and the ones we deserve.
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