Tête-à-Tête: Nashville Rocker Jessy Wilson
In Tête-à-Tête, L'Officiel USA gets into the celebrity psyche by asking stars to tell us what's on their minds right now.
Jessy Wilson is a Nashville-based rock artist on the cusp of her solo career. The recently engaged Brooklyn native has jumped from city to city looking for collaborators and community, finally finding her home in Tennessee. Jessy stresses the importance of work-life balance in an industry that often places “the grind” above everything else, and noticed that Nashville’s grounded atmosphere encourages the flexibility she needs to be successful and keep her head. As a black woman, Jessy hopes to carve out a space for people like her in every genre, not just R&B. Before going solo, she often felt that her audience wasn’t connecting with her own identity or accepting her fully. Now, she has the freedom to claim her own image. Her album Phase is out now.
I started out in musical theater and went from there I became a background singer after that I started writing songs and then from there I moved to Nashville and then I formed a duo and now here I am with my solo album. And when I moved to Nashville, the thing that really, that I really loved the most was how small and connected it felt here. For example, I went to this writing session, I used to sing for John Legend and he had a writing session and I was a part of it and there was a woman there was the co-writer on the song by Miley Cyrus called "The Climb." She wasn’t even supposed to be a part of our write, but she just happened to stop by, and she like gets her guitar and she starts strumming to what we’re writing and basically just joined in the creative conversation. And it was just such an open atmosphere that I had never experienced in LA, had never experienced in New York. And then the woman’s house who we were at like a couple of hours later she looks at her watch and she said “Oh, it’s four o’clock. Gotta go get my kids from school and cook dinner.” Another thing that I had never, ever, ever seen in New York or LA. It’s usually like grind, grind, grind until you die until we make it. You can’t just go hard at something and throw all of yourself into one thing when we’re such complex human beings. Like there are so many holes that need to be filled and grinding in a studio and writing songs can’t fucking fill that hole. Not only that, what the hell are you going to write about if you’re not out experiencing life.
What really started to really change me and make me fall in love with Nashville is after the duo ended and I ventured off into making my solo record. When I would be on stage with my duo, the type of music that I sung attracted a certain audience, and the audience was mostly white southern people. As much as I loved what we were doing, there was a hole there. There was a void because I never saw anyone that looked like me. And when the duo came to an end and I started writing my record, I was just like okay, I really want to make sure that my music represents all of me. I’m a black woman from Brooklyn. I moved to Nashville. I grew up listening to like fucking Lauryn Hill and Jay-A and all the things but also soul music, but then I fell in love with Rock and Americana when I moved here to Nashville and I wanted my album to reflect that. While writing the album, I spent a lot of time here which I hadn’t because I had been on the road most of the three years, but then I started getting out. Little by little, I just built this amazing community of people that just support each other in everything that we’re doing. This last year and a half, it’s been so different just having all these people to love on and to love on me and to stand with me in the things that I believe in. So for instance, on music row in Nashville, this street, it stretches about a mile and a half, two miles and they’ll have banners up there from the different publishing houses and different record companies congratulating the songwriters for their accomplishments. I had never seen a black face on one of these banners. I had a meeting with my publisher right before my album came out, and I told him you know I’ve been here for five years now and I’ve never seen a black face on music row. I started telling him how important I thought that it was for people to be represented. It’s something that’s really dear to me as a woman, as a black woman. And I was like, “You guys are leaving money on the table, and you’re leaving talent on the table, and there’s a lot of fucking talent in this community.” And so the day that my album came out, my manager called me and said: “Did you see your surprise?” And he sent me a picture of a banner of my album on music row, and everybody went fucking crazy. There had never been a black woman on a banner before.
Simultaneously I was on the cover of the East Nashvillian. They had a black woman on the cover but it was Brittany Howard with her band Bermuda Triangle, so it was her and two white women, but never had there been a lone black woman. It’s just my face and you see my fucking juicy ass, beautiful ass lips, and my fucking striking ass cheekbones and my bald green head and it’s like “Pow, bitch.” It’s like “I’m here, bitch.” And so when they sent me that picture and I saw the banner, so that was one instance of community, even in the music industry community with executives, you know, there’s still this sense of caring, but then on the street level, the excitement and the support that just making those two moves. You know, a black woman on the cover and a black woman on the banner, what that engendered was like such an exciting burst of inspiration, I’ve had so many people here come up to me and tell me like “Man, thank you for what you’re doing for Nashville,” because they don’t see it as just something that I’m doing, there’s ownership it. They feel ownership over it, because it’s a community, because I represent all of us and we represent each other.
Every time I push back, I am standing up for a little girl in her living room or her bedroom listening to Cage the Elephant and Rihanna and trying to figure out “Wow, I love both of these things, how do I make it one, how do I make it mine?” And by the time that she’s in my position making an album and figuring out how she’s going to get it to the masses, hopefully executives and labels and people like that won’t feel like it’s such an odd thing to see an alternative black woman want to do something other than what has been given. Cause I won’t even say that I’m doing something new. I mean, black women have been doing rock music since the beginning of time. Sister Rosetta Spark is the queen of rock music, she fucking invented that shit. And black people invented rock, but it’s become a narrative that it’s a white male sport, it’s a white male’s creative medium, and I don’t agree with that.
This is a story about overcoming obstacles. No is not a new answer to me, but I always turn my No’s into Yes's. A friend of mine once said to me, “Have you ever read The War of Art?” And I said, “No.” “Anytime when you’re doing something important, like when you’re pushing against the current, things will push back, the energy will push back. That just means you are pushing against something and it’s important.” And I had never thought of it that way before because I had always felt that resistance, you know what I mean. But when I feel that resistance, now I have that knowledge. I don’t let anything deter me from getting where I want to get.
