Click Image to Download!

Jessye DeSilva (they/them) will no longer apologize for being themself. Their new, crowdfunded album, Renovations, chronicles an ongoing journey to self-love and-acceptance: examining identity and trauma, reckoning with privilege and marginalization, reconciling self-image with others’ images of you, finding power in vulnerability, and learning to give yourself grace, advocate for yourself, and ignore the haters.

It’s an imperfect journey, naturally, with both moments of resignation and moments of triumph for DeSilva, a non-binary, trans person and the child of a preacher whose conservative religion left no room for their personhood. “I feel like what I’m writing is often just a reflection of where I’m at in my own journey,” they say. “I think the album is a reflection of the work I’m doing on myself. I do feel a stronger sense of self, or at least who I am in this moment.”

As DeSilva wrote these songs — sometimes alone, sometimes with their “musical soulmate,” Alex Calabrese, a fellow performer DeSilva met online and began working with during the COVID-19 pandemic — they found themself wondering: “What are the changes that I want to make, and how do I want to show up in the world?”

“It’s not all negative ideas and changes,” clarifies DeSilva, a classically trained vocalist and a voice teacher for musical theater students at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee College of Music. “Some of it’s showing up in the way that aligns best with my sense of morality and justice.”

The bright piano-pop song “Dysphoria,” the first of 11 tracks on Renovations, is direct and unapologetic in its message to people (even well-meaning ones) who make DeSilva uncomfortable in their own body: “It’s saying, ‘This is a you problem, not a me problem,’” they say.

“I think sometimes, even in my songwriting, I feel like I almost have this need to apologize for my feelings,” DeSilva adds. “Sometimes I find it’s actually hard to just write a song and let it be angry without feeling like I have to kind of minimize something or make people comfortable.”

“Firecracker,” however, is as an exercise in owning their sensitivity and capacity for empathy. Others often wielded those descriptors as weapons against DeSilva during their childhood, “but learning how to still be sensitive and still be soft, but also not take any shit, feels like a fucking superpower to me,” they say. The song — inspired by artists such as Stevie Nicks and Florence & the Machine (“the Millennial Stevie Nicks,” DeSilva says with a laugh), who juxtapose femininity with strength in an empowering way — has become a mantra of sorts for DeSilva, its steady drum beat and frenetic melody driving the message home. “If I sing it enough, I’ll just believe it more and more,”they reason.

If “Firecracker” is a meditation on finding your inner power, “Proud & Lonely” is one on finding your peace — “finding solace and finding rest in the midst of a really lonely, heartbreaking, grief-stricken world” DeSilva describes — set to a calming, comforting melody of acoustic guitar and fiddle. In concert, DeSilva says, “It always feels a little bit like sitting around a campfire.”

Even the quietest songs on Renovations, DeSilva’s third album, are made powerful by DeSilva’s delivery, inspired both by their musical theater background and the theatrical nature of the second-wave emo bands of the 1990s they listened to growing up.“Sundays,” for example, tackles their religious trauma, building to a dramatic bridge that pulls from the hymn “Praise for the Fountain Opened.” “Easier to Run,” which cops to our tendency to let career and capitalism define us and hide our truest selves, has a jangly melody and harmonies that call to mind peak-era Barenaked Ladies. DeSilva learned the importance of specificity in songwriting from the pop-rock bands of the ‘90sand, of course, folk icon Joni Mitchell.

Renovations culminates in the soaring piano ballad “Clouds,” a heart-on-their-sleeve message of hope to young trans people, but also to DeSilva’s younger self. It’s the song they wish they had years ago.

“I grew up not really seeing trans people and queer people portrayed very often at all in public. It was very rare to see any depictions of trans people, let alone positive ones,”says DeSilva, a 2023 Nashville Scene artist to watch and 2022 Boston Music Awards Americana Artist of the Year nominee. “Today, everywhere you turn, trans people are being demonized, and I was just thinking about, I felt like it was hard enough to reconcile my identity and how hard it must be right now for kids. It’s so hard to see beyond the fact that they’re validity is being debated publicly.”

DeSilva made space for that community while making the album, calling on fellow LGBTQIA+ musicians — including Ellen Angelico, Jake Blount, and Aaron Lee Tasjan —to play on the songs. “First and foremost, I chose these people because they’re great musicians and they’re friends and they’re people that I love to work with, but representation doesn’t just stop with the front-person of a band. It’s also about hiring and working with people from those communities,” DeSilva says.

Queer and trans empowerment are at the very heart of Renovations, and DeSilva’s vision for the album crystalized as they watched lawmakers around the United States work to criminalize drag performances and gender-affirming care for trans youth.

“You don’t have to be queer or trans to relate to the album, but I’m putting this out for my trans kin right now,” DeSilva says. “I’m not going to try to make this mainstream or try really hard to appeal to universality, because this isn’t the moment for that.”