Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter
Exhalations Of Distressed Loves And Beasts
Jan 22, 2009
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Mike Gentry
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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Spectral Beings
original version appears on Like, Love, Lust & the Open Halls Of The Soul
This song is really just a journey, a string of impressionistic metaphors speaking to the idea of reconnecting with our inner core; the fundamental values and internal struggles inherent to humans. I struggle continuously to stay engaged in this life and not feel lost and disconnected at times. This quandary has been around since day one, but I believe we face more challenges now than ever before, and I fear that we may be losing contact with—becoming increasingly estranged from, the core elements of the human experience.
So how does one remain on course—-not lose touch with ourselves, our pasts, and those who came before us? How does one remain connected to some sense of the divine? We seem to accept the idea (and even revel in it!) that the concept of our lives having meaning is lost on us. How does one determine what is meaningful in a world that we perceive as having lost all meaning? I think it's all too easy to 'jump on board' and become a cynic—-to give up the search or quest for love and a deeper connection with ourselves, others, and the divine. We have so many material things to value and distract us, and sadly, this means that there are more things to discard as well… and yes, "everything is up for grabs". Few things are held sacred (it takes a lot of individual and collective effort!), and as our culture has become increasingly fractured and frayed, it's all too easy to blame technology. I find its role in our lives to be often unflattering and even ridiculous (our collective obsession with Internet and cell phones, in particular). But, even so, I've found that ultimately little has changed about the basic nature of our internal struggles…we just have a lot more BS to sift through in order to reclaim and salvage what I feel we have been losing along the way. I just hope there are a lot of sifters out there!!!"
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Drinking With Strangers
original version appears on Reckless Burning
I think this is the first song Phil and I ever wrote together…it came at a time when we had been feeling really estranged from a lot of things. It was written at a time when we spent most of our days and nights in bars. I like the live version a lot better then the recorded version-I think!
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Made of Wood
original version appears on Reckless Burning
I wrote this one summer when I was 21 . I had been living in NYC and went upstate to visit my father …it's a pretty pathologically twisted little ditty…I mean that's the age when you sort of begin the grieving process of your childhood-the letting go of the good and the bad….and that grief often blends into the existing struggles one has when entering the "adult" relationship phase…and I think I sort of realized in writing this, how angry I was at that moment. I also think I kind of knew I was going to have a tough road ahead in terms of relationships-songs are funny that way….the highest part of ourselves seems to present us with a little crystal ball in the form of song, all too often. Anyway, it's the only one I still play that I wrote in my 20's , and I find that as dark as the lyrics are…I am able to somehow still find new pathways or layers that hadn't yet been revealed to me… it changes as I change.
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In The Summertime
original version appears on Gentleness of Nothing
This is from the Gentleness of Nothing ep….I guess it's really just about forbidden love. Something about the summer that makes one think on this notion, even if they never experienced it first hand… a love too young, too old, or too married perhaps?
The drowsy is here, not in the hereafter. It is a sweet here though, a very sweet here that feels, nay, smells like the fermentation of corn mash, of whatever kind of mash is going to produce a brew that will put the maximum amount of hair on your chest or make you so falling down drunk that it features a skull and crossbones on the label. It sounds like that fermentation, the breaking down of solid particles and reducing them to shaking, quivering runts hoping someone might come by with a feathered jacket or a sweatshirt. Jesse Sykes and her Sweet Hereafter group of players are able to get very blunt in a sleepy, folksy kind of way that takes us into the territory of spooks and bumps in the night that can't be figments of the imagination, but completely real and goose pimple-raising. Sykes is almost a rustic-y vixen-like Vincent Price, at least the way that Bill Hader plays him on Saturday Night Live, drawn to the macabre or the potentially macabre elements of love and the outdoors. These are gentle eyes, for love only, dulled or muted. They are spirits of care and passion turned into the empty souls left to wander the earth invisibly and lonely, set permanently into an ugly, stalking purgatory. It's interesting how a purgatory - or Sykes' perceived purgatory - can have the same kind of warm chill as a late autumn or an early spring, take your pick. She sings about summertime here, but that's almost a ruse as she's most interested in the kinds of conditions that couldn't be tolerated with too little clothing, just enough. She's guided in her writing by a drafty sense of the crestfallen or the stale old feel of heartbreak or luckless bewilderment. It's as if all of these modestly comfortable seasons and all of these eerie misgivings are a part of some kind of conspiracy that needs to be handled with the utmost of care and even more startling cool. She sings out through these mists and fogs and it gives off a hazy undercurrent of alcoholic substance. It's as if we've sunk, or been anchored, to the basement of a thick-bottomed tumbler of bourbon or whiskey, splashing around in the stagnant drink. We're in the midst of the heavy amber color and looking to the outside of the glass, it feels like a constant twilight hour, getting us sleepy and woozy. Sykes finds herself reaching out to touch the darknesses that always seem as if they should be left alone or approached cautiously. There's no sense in waking the angry beasts if they can be left pacified and none the wiser for our presence. She messes with the demons and gets up close enough to take in the scents of their resting breaths. She lets them dry out her eyes and her hair, lets them cool off her mugs of teas - these exhalations of the beasts, of the distressed loves. They are culpable for all the things they've put her through, for all of the raw emotions they pluck from her head and eyes, for all of the red tension and apprehension that they bring out in her. It's all a part of the law of the land though. It's never changed and it likely never will change and that's what she finds most spooking and chilling about any of it.
Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter Official Site
Barsuk Records
