About Jess
Imagine you’re a young singer with a bunch of raw talent. You do the things everyone does in school when you’re talented. You’re in the top school choirs, you get big roles in school and community musicals, and you earn accolades in all-county, all-state, all-region choirs. You excel at playing multiple instruments, including piano, and win multiple state piano competitions. You attend elite music camps in the summers. You’re hired all over town to sing and play in church services, civic events, weddings, and funerals. Everyone around you believes you’re going to be a successful artist someday, and they all believe college is the way to get there. So you go.
You get a big scholarship and go to a great school. You get straight A’s in every class and reach your performance requirements at an accelerated rate. You sweep almost every music accolade in the department. Graduation is a day full of high fives and tears and congrats and the feeling that you’ve ticked every box to prepare yourself for your next steps an artist.
(Optional: Go to grad school. Repeat.)
And then you enter the world of having to fill venues and make money as an artist. There is no guaranteed audience of peers and teachers at recitals anymore. You quickly realize the average audience member isn’t going to come to a gig because of your degrees or grades or accolades. They’re going to come to your gigs because they believe you can make them FEEL something. They will come because they connect to YOUR STORY and YOUR VIBE.
Everything you did up until this point was ticking other people’s boxes. Filling other people’s containers. Taking on roles in other people’s systems and organizations and visions. You realize you were more focused on the Gold Stars and attaboys than the art itself.
You realize that being “good” or “talented” isn’t enough. Yes, all of the skills and knowledge you gained can help you tell your story in a very skillful way, but they’re not the end game like they often were in school. Your story is. The connection is. The feeling is. YOU are the thing people want to experience.
You realize you’ve never really thought about your story or your vibe or what makes you unique. You definitely don’t know how to amplify your uniqueness in your song choices, or how you dress, or how you market yourself, or how you set up a stage or talk to an audience. Despite everything you learned and achieved, you feel clueless.
This was my story, and it’s the story of way too many people I’ve met who thought they were doing all of the right things. But we were missing the biggest ingredient of all: ourselves.
For me, it took time to shift from focusing on those gold stars and attaboys to focusing on what art’s actually supposed to be: expressing my Self. And I had to start by fostering my autonomous Self…a Self who had her own feelings, thoughts, opinions, preferences, some of which would disappoint the people whose approval she had sought for so long.
I started spending time exploring music I wanted to make because it brought ME joy, even if a musician I respected would think it was cringe or bad or simplistic. I started writing lyrics that told MY story and shared MY thoughts and feelings, even if it called out my religious trauma and exposed the mental health struggles my family was ashamed to talk about.
Thanks to therapy, somatic work, great teachers and collaborators, and a pile of self-help and creativity books, I finally found MY art…my own style, my own arrangements, my own songs, my own inner magic.