Jessye DeSilva -- Glitter Up the Dark

Glitter Up the Dark will get you ready for summer. Singer-songwriter Jessye DeSilva’s “late day waking, sunscreen daydreams” and “nights where the music makes you high” are around the corner—improbable as it feels that time could move so quickly.

Glitter Up the Dark is DeSilva’s first album as a trans woman after years living as nonbinary. The Boston-based alt-Americana artist wrote this third full-length album from Tennessee—a state that enacted a drag ban while she and her producer Aaron Lee Tasjan collaborated on the album, in a country whose legislation feels hellbent on destruction for queer people and the planet. (A big part of what makes life today go by so dizzyingly fast).

But we’ve “gotta stay in the moment,” she reminds us on “Life on Earth,” “because the moment never lasts.” The meaning here is twofold: a reassurance that better days are bound to come, and a reminder that now is the only time we’re guaranteed. With that in mind, Glitter Up the Dark celebrates those queer spaces, like a drag show’s stage, which feel sacred and help us survive.

The album dropped in between Trans Day of Visibility and Easter Sunday, an apt release date for an artist intent on making “unholy ruckus.” From a stubbornly hopeful place, awash in ‘90s synth, DeSilva serenades the good fight for equal rights, and all the summer nights we have to look forward to.

“The Real,” featuring an ecstatic electric guitar solo from LaFemmeBear, opens the album with a steady drumbeat and lots of love for America’s “real mothertruckers.” Anchored by gorgeous, raw vocals from DeSilva, “Comrades In Arms” is an ode to the ways we’re connected. The titular “Glitter Up the Dark” approaches a sister “out there in your fishnets honey, way before it was cool” with bottomless compassion for the struggle that can come with living your truth—or feeling unable to. This song’s chorus turns into an animating question for the album: “How do you glitter up the dark, glitter when they block out the light?”

Gender trouble is for everybody. Gender euphoria, though, takes guts. As DeSilva sings in the gently mournful “Forever In Drag,” “We’re all hurled into this world naked and afraid. We try on so many things for the sake of the parade.” DeSilva regards a fearful America from a better place than she’s been before. As dissonant as that can feel, she told Nashville Scene: “I would rather be in a really good place at a really shitty time than in a really shitty place at a really shitty time.”

Glitter Up the Dark naturally has a driving song, too, and a love song. Both look to being truly known: “Like heaven fell to earth, the way you see me now,” DeSilva sings in “Jar of Fireflies,” “Like I’ve known you all my life.” In “Love on the Road,” she coaxes those feeling stagnant and alone: “Loneliness is only love with nowhere to go.”

In the closing song, “Eldritch,” one remembers stories of queer love that punctuate centuries of history—or how queerness shapes the world’s fauna, from lesbian seagulls to whiptail lizards—as DeSilva, and featured artists Adia Victoria and Butch Walker, intone, “Ancient love gonna follow you down.” It’s a fitting, haunting end to conjure queerness as cellular, and eternal.

Queer joy becomes a kind of immortal dance floor in Glitter Up the Dark—and DeSilva leaves room for anyone who might want to come and join her party.

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