In Conversation With #108 - Jessica Leigh
Rising electro-pop artist Jessica Leigh has just released her debut EP ’17’ - which is four tracks big-playful choruses and a story that makes the listener reflect, by telling the a tale of love from it’s humble beginning to it’s inevitable end. She took a moment to talk to us about the release.
Hey there Jessica, how are you? How does it feel to be putting out music during a troubled time for the creative industry?
Hey! I’m well thank you, just trying to keep the boat steady in these turbulent times!
It’s definitely an interesting process, especially because this is the first time I’ve ever released music seriously. But I’m glad to be doing it, I think people are turning to art more than ever to escape and be reassured - and if I can offer that escape in some way with my music I’ll be very happy!
It is titled ’17’ - does that hold a certain meaning to you?
The EP is all about that year of my life, which was an incredibly formative time. You’re falling out with your parents while falling in love with the boy from out of town and really learning some tough lessons about the realities of life. I’ve also always loved coming of age stories, so I wanted to tell mine through that quintessentially intense, electric, passionate lens of youth.
With this being your debut EP, how did you decide which tracks to be featured on it?
The writing process was actually really interesting. I wrote Could This Be Love and Wait For Me first, and then decided I wanted to extrapolate upon and connect the relationships established in those songs. Eventually, I ended up with four songs that tell this story of two young people falling in love and how growing up gets in the way. SING ALONG and 17 came really easily once I’d decided on the story I wanted to tell. It’s an incredibly fun process to think of songs as components of a whole, rather than as individual entities!
This EP sees you teaming up with producer / sound engineer Jules Evans, who has worked with the likes of Freya Ridings and Eric Clapton. How was that experience? And how did that partnership come about?
It couldn’t have been a better experience. We’ve been working together for a couple of years now, and are continually getting better at reading each other’s minds in terms of each song’s trajectory.
There’s always this complete freedom of expression in the studio, which is ideal while all those alpha waves are flowing!
It’s actually really funny how we met - he got his hair cut at my mum’s barbershop and they got to talking about music. After a few phone calls and emails, the rest was history, and here we are!
What are the key themes and influences on the EP?
I wanted the EP to be a ‘coming of age epic’ of sorts; a love letter to that time in my life. It’s about being young and in love, despite the odds. Despite being too young to really do anything and to take anything seriously. Despite the uncertainty over which paths life will lead you down. You still love this person after all that, because you love how they make you feel. It’s about living purely in the euphoria of that feeling. In essence, I really just wanted to encapsulate how it felt to be 17, in all its ups and downs.
The biggest influence on the EP is definitely Lorde’s Pure Heroine. I love that album. If I’d never listened to it, I’d have fond memories instead of songs, because I never would have looked at my friends and experiences in the way Ella’s lyrics encourage you to.
There is a poetic flow to your lyrics, do you read any poetry? If so, who are your favourite writers?
Thank you! I do indeed. My favourite writer is T.S Eliot by a mile. The way he accentuates and romanticises the most mundane things is mindblowing… I also love Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson for the same reason. Lana Del Rey’s debut collection is amazing too!
Do you have a favorite lyric on the EP? If so, which one and why?
Ooooh, I think my favourite would have to be “wait for me by the seaside, wait for me / we’ll watch the gulls fly high like airborne sonnets / the one’s from our aged memories.”
It’s from the last track on the EP - Wait For Me. The song is about asking this person you loved when you were 17 to wait for you until your paths cross again later in life. Of course, this is a ridiculously unfair thing to ask someone, but you’re desperate to make things work, so you ask them anyway. The gulls are a testament to how nostalgia has tinted everything golden and romantic in your mind, and you can almost believe they were poetry lilting on the breeze. I guess at the end of the day that really is the main thing coursing through the EP - nostalgia’s sweetness.