Jessey Jackson [Surf Coast]
Subscribe
X

Subscribe to Forte Magazine

Jessey Jackson [Surf Coast]

Anglesea’s Jessey Jackson simply loves music more than anything else on earth – the perfect motivation for her musical career. The singer-songwriter says that music means absolutely everything to her.
“If I’m not a musician I’m nothing. It’s pretty much that simple. I can’t do or be anything else and if I don’t have music in my life I’m completely lost. A couple of years ago I went through an illness and I came to the conclusion that life was too short and decided that if I wasn’t doing something to do with music than I didn’t want to do it.”
Jessey has now recovered and is constantly playing gigs throughout the Surf Coast region and beyond. It’s hard to define exactly what her style is, as even she can’t give it a definitive label. “I think it’s probably a blues, folk, soul, maybe even a little bit of country mix,” she says. “I do a bit of everything. My performances aren’t just one genre and my written music isn’t just one genre. I love music in general. I have an eclectic taste in music and I think that shows in my writing.”
After a handful of music lessons when she was little, followed by a break of many years, she picked up the guitar again a few years ago and has been self-taught since then. These days she’s constantly writing songs, all based on her life experiences. “I don’t have the ability to write for the sake of writing,” she says. “I have to have experienced something or seen something in the world or felt a connection to whatever it is that I’m writing about. So life inspires me.”
Apart from the performing side of things, more recently she has released her new album Deliver Me, which she produced, mixed and mastered, in addition to writing all the songs and playing all the instruments. She says it was a bit of an up and down experience all around.
“I was actually a bit burnt,” she says. “I had an album done in about 2010 called Only Human, and the people who recorded it did not do a fantastic job. So from that point on I figured why am I going to spend thousands of dollars for someone else to mess it up when I could mess it up myself? It was a great lot of fun when I first started out. But towards the end, particularly in the mastering bit, it got quite difficult to separate from it. Nothing was ever good enough. So I worked on it, worked on it. In the end I had to set a deadline and just let it alone and be happy with what I had. But I was reasonably happy with what came out of it.”
Jessey has a number of upcoming gigs in the region. She’s playing at the Old Hepburn Hotel on August 3, before shows at Pistol Pete’s Food n Blues on August 29 and Martians on September 6. She says she just loves performing and is very happy with how her career’s going.
“I’m not looking for fame and fortune; that’s far too hard. I’ve seen what it does to people. Fame kills people. I think I would happily settle for my music being able to speak to people. That would be enough for me.”
Where&When: Old Hepburn Hotel, Hepburn Springs – August 3
Written by Daniel Waight

Recommended