At the crossroads of comfortable certainty and immeasurable risk, Jessie Abbey took a leap of faith.
She left behind a steady job that she enjoyed in order to focus on her music full time.
Her sojourn into uncharted waters is catalogued in her late-2016 EP “The Deep and the Sea,” a five-song folk-rock foray into a fresh, freedom-fueled state of mind.
Abbey, 29, recorded the album in Daytona Beach with producer Clayton Sturgeon soon after relocating with her husband, Blake, to the east coast from her native Sacramento. But the inspiration for her first solo outing, which debuted at No. 7 on the iTunes Alternative Folk chart, has been building for a decade.
Looking back now, it seems a passionate pursuit of music was inevitable.
Abbey’s grandmother was Japanese and urged her children to excel in one of the arts of her culture. Abbey’s mother, born in San Francisco, chose to play the koto, a 13-string, 6-foot-long Japanese instrument, and spent part of her 20s in intense training in Japan. Abbey’s father plays guitar and drums, and his siblings are musicians as well.
“(I knew) all along I needed to give myself room to breathe and be creative. I was suffocating myself with doing all these other things that I liked but that weren’t beneficial to my music.”
That internal struggle became song lyrics, and that song ultimately grew into the title track on her EP.
“This ship has sailed,” the album’s opening verse proclaims. “I won’t change my mind. I’m leaving for good, dear, and I mean it this time.”
“It’s about sailing away from land and something that’s holding you back, and then looking out to the horizon and not necessarily knowing exactly what it looks like on the other side of the world but knowing you’re being called there,” said Abbey.
“It was applicable to my struggles at the time (I wrote it), but it’s a constant reminder of staying on the path to freedom.”
The theme of the album, she said, is forward motion — never going back.
Stylistically it’s Americana-adjacent, minus the banjo-tinged bluegrass twang. It is by turns “haunting and moody” but still “quirky and fun. I feel like it’s a hopeful melancholy,” she said.
Abbey also is a co-founder with her husband of Musical Charis, a band that fluctuates between two and 10 members at any given show, depending on the venue. Musical Charis fits into the indie folk category as well but is more upbeat and a little more pop-leaning than her solo effort, Abbey said.
Article Credit – Daytona beach News Journal