(personal narrative starts here… skip if you only want to hear about the album)
Everyone should have a facilitator – someone in your corner to tell you the things you dream about – the crazy to the mundane- are not that far out of reach.
I’ve had many facilitators. I’ve tried, in turn, to fill that need for my friends.
This time it was my husband.
I wasn’t even trying. We JUST went on the mini tour with Salim. My needs should have been sated for awhile yet.
Doug, I sigh. Doug, Jesse’s album dropped the same day as Salim’s – June 23rd. His album release show is 06/30/23. It’s a Friday… 800+ miles away. We were JUST in Nashville for The Church and it was… expensive (we flew.)
Doug doesn’t even blink. Ask for it, tell your boss you’ll get your Friday work done early. We’ll drive it.
This feeling. Right here. If I could bottle… I love being surprised and this was joyful. I had *no* idea I could even hope for this and POOF there it is. A reasonable plan to accomplish this most primal of needs: to be front and center for music I love.
I get all my work done. I don’t hear from my boss about my leave. I pack anyway. I rage (quietly as is my way). I am a GOOD EMPLOYEE. I’ve only called in sick twice in the last three years and that was for COVID. Righteous indignation flows from every fiber of my being. I am about to get real ‘sick’. Uh huh. Don’t mess with me.
The long and short is they missed my request. It’s fine. I got Friday’s work done on Thursday. And just like that, Cinderella is allowed to go to the ball.
I log off my computer, car already packed, Doug awaits to whisk me off on the first leg of our journey. 6+ hrs gets us to Arkadelphia (“… freedom! Shine the light…”) The rest of the journey puts us in Nashville at 2ish. We sleep. Like the dead.
Awake.
Clean up. Get presentable. The venue website says, “Dress to impress” (it also likens itself to the Viper Room, but I would say only a 21st century Viper Room with Yelp reviews to contend with. A Viper Room genuinely concerned with both the use of coasters and Your Good Time.) It’s hard to “bring it” any harder than we do normally on a show night, but we try. I wear make up (never a guarantee) and Doug picks the spiffiest paisley shirt he brought.
The venue – The Eighth Room – has PARKING… A limited amount, but… (angelic singing) PARKINNNNNGGGG… regardless.
The side of the building sports artful “grafitti” – Rockstars live here. Good. We’re home then, I joke.
The Kraken tentacle door pull… is locked. I look up. There’s a camera. Please, Mr Eye in The Sky… please let us in…it’s hot. There’s a click. We walk in… and are immediately told things aren’t ready yet. Ok, I’m going to stand right here and not be in anyone’s way while being 2 degrees cooler than I was out there. Ok?
Not ok.
We are shuffled back outside.
Uh, why did you unlock the door then? They remedy this by locking it behind us.
We steam gently on the pavement for an interminable length of time. I start to wilt… sadness… I wore makeup on purpose for this.
*CLICK*
We are allowed back in!!! All is forgiven. The inside is dark and cold and… oh sweet Saint of Achy Joints and Bad Backs… there is a COUCH. I sink deliciously in to it and experience something rarely afforded me at shows: comfort.
I order a Diet Coke (psttt… use of coasters… that was foreshadowing) that I sip while goggling at my surroundings. There are statues with painted sayings emblazoned on them (“No more fake friends.”) Mirrors. Every surface is a different pattern, but it all works together. There is a stage directly in front of us hung with crushed velvet curtains.
There’s a fleeting pang in my chest. Had our business situation not prematurely folded last Summer, this is the type of space I would have wanted our venue to be.
I set the Diet Coke on the glass top table behind me and reach for what I thought might be a menu — later, a ghost appears unnoticed and places a folded napkin under my drink to catch the condensation. I am completely oblivious. Instead of a list of cocktails and nibbles, I’m looking at a program! Like this is a graduation or a kid’s school play.
I love it.
Under a tentative set list, I see this. No attribution (but he told me just now as I write this that yes, he and the others in the band wrote it). But this is why I am here… I’m tearing up again just reading it.
Artist’s Manifesto:
“We do so aim to create a beautiful noise to the best of our ability, an reckoning. We speak our simple truth, without falsehood. Let our words never be amended, censored, or appeased. Our concerns lie not the realm of the material or the monetary, but rather the spiritual and the poetical. For the benefit, not merely the entertainment, of all living creatures, the plants, the air, the soil, the water, and the sky.”
How many of these programs just got wadded up and thrown away that night? That is easily one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen … did anyone else even read it?
Showtime:
There’s Landon [Pigg]. If you’ve seen Jesse at all recently, you’ve seen Landon. I tried to research when the relationship began and the answer seems to be the end of last year (2022). For lack of more information, I’m going to create a scenario from the one bit I did manage to find about the relationship being borne of an appreciation of “red wine and music”… or something like that. Something half childhood playground interaction where it really was as easy as just asking, “Wanna be friends?” and the scene in Stepbrothers, “Did we just become… BEST. FRIENDS?”
Landon is all button-down shirt earnest. I love the quote in the program, “Landon is a young man on a soul quest. In a word, he is ‘nimble.’ His upper range engages birds and the more tuneful of dogs. Down, Scruffy, down girl!” A playful jab at the attractive nature of the earnest boy charming the birds down from the trees. His voice is beautiful. His songs are sweet and wistful. Though he seems to spend his time with Jesse on the percussive side (shaker, maracas, tambourine, bongos), he seems an adept multi-instrumentalist in his own right, moving comfortably between keys and guitar.
At some point, it starts to rain. It doesn’t even sound real at first. It sounds like rain sticks I used to see (don’t touch!) at the mall when I was a kid.
Beautiful.
I return to a lyric for what I’m sure won’t be the last time. From Occasionally Joy, “My wardrobe can’t make up its mind…” I’ve already amended my list of Jesse’s outfit personas once. I’m thrown a new one tonight. Jeans, white tank, and… Castiel help us… a trench coat. Tonight he looks like The Highlander (“there can be ONLY ONE!”) and I am living for it.
Just like my time spent Salim last weekend, Jesse with a band is a completely new experience from his quiet, unassuming performances spied thus far. I had a basic idea from videos watched online. It was completely different seeing it live.
Jesse is a man possessed. The demon-spirit is music. The Rock. I verify in my photos later – he’s not even aware at times. He is transported. Slave and master. Dominance and submission. Complete thrall to the sounds he wrestles from his guitar. He throws himself to the ground. “Haven’t the monkeys…” Writhes. “Done such…” Submits to the music while his guitar submits to him. “Lovely job…”
What we got:
Power of Us, The Future’s Been Canceled, The Last Time I Saw Nancy Claire (She Wasn’t Really There), Haven’t the Monkeys Done Such a Lovely Job, Feed Her to the Snake, Ads You Can Really Taste, I’m So Happy (I Think I Might Cry)*, Biting off The Hand that Feeds, Drop Dead and Die*, The Dream Where You Can’t Wake Up*, Everybody’s Got Somebody (Nobody’s Got Me)*, Backyard Party MDA*
(*from Violensia)
MDA was a delightful finale as everyone got up – lead by Landon who boasts some wicked rug cutting capability – and started dancing. It was fun to watch. Happiness like that is catching. A high note to end on for sure.
(READ HERE IF YOU SKIPPED PERSONAL NARRATIVE TO GET TO THE ALBUM STUFF)
Here is your Violensia sound bite:
“This album is SO GOOD it made me FLIP TABLES at my local mall food court. Buy it NOW!” — Someone With a Valuable Opinion (me, it’s me, I have a valuable opinion)
Back to my POV:
The show was amazing. We ended up rocking out next to a kind, older gentleman who was later revealed to be the Pigg Patriarch (or Father Pigg as he is now in my phone). He was delighted to meet us and hear of our long trek to see Jesse and his sons (Gabe, the drummer, belongs to Clan Pigg too). He even asked me what the draw was. It’s taken me time to realize why some of his music is so comfortable, so familiar to me.
Jesse said of the Violensia songs, “They are just so weird and dramatic and operatic…”
I showed Papa Pigg the tattoo that takes up a good portion of my right shin. Another young man with sculpted cheekbones and a flare for the “weird and dramatic and operatic.” Dad gets it. He says he already thought that with Jesse’s choice of white tank top tonight.
There can be only one…
Landon talks to us for a bit. He talks again about the stickers I gifted him with when I saw them in May. They were AI generated and then manipulated in Procreate. One is a guinea pig in front of a foamy cappuccino and the other is an anthropomorphized guinea pig playing a guitar. I was mildly terrified giving them to him. Afraid perhaps, like me, his name got him bullied in school, but no, he seemed delighted. Neither he nor Jesse seem to have much merch (I do stickers for Salim as a freebie at his merch table “Do you have room in your life for stickers?” He will ask people while they browse his offerings). Landon agrees they don’t have much merch usually, but he then tells me that his Mom has framed the stickers (I don’t know if I got this right, but I immediately see them placed over a mantle piece, something Mother Pigg has given pride of place to, she gazes fondly at them when she thinks of her boy, the singer… And oh YES in this imagining they are a family of Pixar animated guinea pigs ready to star in “Sing 3.” Please don’t begrudge me my happy mind movies.)
I pause… I think for a minute… trying to write this.
I don’t know what I am trying to express to you, the collective you.
I know there are people out there who feel like I do. People who don’t have a drug yet to keep them going. I’m just trying to show you mine. There’s a scene in the 1990 “It” where the little kid with asthma has it revealed to him that his medicine is just water. “If you need it, ” his friends tell him, “It’s good medicine.”
I’ll never write something that will single handedly drive up anyone’s album sales (but per the above Manifesto, it’s not even about that… this makes me feel better.) I’m just trying to show you out there in the darkness with me that there are lights, there are drugs – whatever they mean to you – there are things to keep going for.
There is beauty.
My favorite song from Violensia is “Dream Where You Can’t Wake up” (complete aside: I’m either psychic or the Gods of People Afraid to Fly unlocked Violensia for me months ago so I could listen to it on a flight recently while trying not think about crashing .. when I could finally listen to it officially, I knew EXACTLY how this entire song went):
“Tomorrow’s gonna come, the sun is gonna shine, shine on everyone…tomorrow’s gonna come blue skies are gonna hang far above everyone…”
And now I’m really dating myself. Just like Curly said in “City Slickers,” the answer is one thing.. ONE… but you have to figure out what that one thing is.
For me, it’s the hope I hear in these songs, Salim, Jesse, YOU out there making music because it’s what your soul needs to survive.
I’m not alone. There is something beautiful to look for. And when the darkness starts to creep back in, I will search for my next “hit” and the artists in the above manifesto will be out there ready to provide.
“To every broken heart that came before… I’m gonna be just fine…”
TLDR:
Jesse Daniel Edwards is an amazing artist. His new album is called “Violensia.” YOU WANT IT. It’s on Spotify, but vote with your dollars: HERE.
