Intersectional Americana.
Radical Vulnerability.

Jessye DeSilva will no longer apologize for being herself. Her latest, 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.

Photo by Laura Schneider

It’s an imperfect journey, naturally, with both moments of resignation and moments of triumph for DeSilva, a trans person and the child of a preacher whose conservative religion left no room for her personhood. “I feel like what I’m writing is often just a reflection of where I’m at in my own journey,” she says. “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.”

Photo by Laura Schneider

As DeSilva wrote these songs — sometimes alone, sometimes with her “musical soulmate,” Alex Calabrese, a fellow performer DeSilva met online and began working with during the COVID-19 pandemic — she found herself 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.”

Queer and trans empowerment are at the very heart of Renovations, and DeSilva’s vision for the album crystalized as she 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.”