Jessie Altman Performs “Lovelight” At The Bitter End
Sometimes it’s okay to wear rose-colored glasses. For Jessie Altman, who just performed at Paul Colby’s Bitter End, where she debuted songs from her upcoming album Lovelight in New York City. Romance isn’t quick and turbulent; it’s slow and full of so much more.
“I’ve always kind of felt like I didn’t always see my story in some songs,” She said after the show.
“We live in an age where so much is online, and people tend to be very emphatic online. Like, ‘I was incomplete until I met this person. Like, ‘ You’ve completed my life, and you know I just never found. ‘ I always felt like a pretty happy and complete person, and so I really try to write about stuff that I identify with, like my own love stories and my own insecurities and things that I’m dealing with and grappling with.”
A lot of her music is, as she describes it, self-deprecating, but in a way that she embraces. Songs like “Clumsy” and “Fake It” are about being clumsy in life and sometimes having impostor syndrome.
“We all have these quirks, but the quirks are kind of the best part. So I like whenever I’m writing anything, you know, I like who I am, and I’m, and we should all be proud of those pieces of ourselves.”
Altman walks the audience through those feelings. She uses the example of her last EP, Sleepwalking, as an example:
“I was really thinking about when people are having these times, but they can be their own worst enemy, and these internal struggles that we kind of have with ourselves and lies we tell ourselves, the illusions that we have, and so it was all kind of an exploration into that idea.”
And her grasp on these very real concepts and feelings translates into her writing. For her upcoming Album ‘Love Light,’ Altman, Sam Hollander (of Panic At The Disco and One Direction fame), and Grant Michaels explore the idea of love and what it sometimes feels like.
“When I got into the studio with Sam and Grant, the first song we wrote was “For the Hell of It,” and the next song we wrote was “Reverie.”, And after we wrote those two songs, it felt like a light had just switched on. It’s like, okay, I know, I know what I want this album to be.'”
She also drew inspiration from conversations about relationships, friends, her guitar player’s wife, and even her own love story to write this album.
Her latest single release, Barcelona, is a reflection of that. “Barcelona” was inspired by her first date with her now-husband at a restaurant of the same name.
In the track, she captures that feeling of “Not wishing on a star” or expecting to “fall as hard”
“It was just this immediate feeling. It wasn’t necessarily like, oh, this is my forever person. It was, oh, he’s special. This is different. I need. I need to see where it goes. It’s one of those moments where you just stop in your tracks. You get really excited about somebody, and you have to just see where it goes. And little did I know, it was my last first date,” Altman recalls.
Barcelona is featured as a single on her upcoming album Lovelight, which will be available September 25,
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