Jesse Sykes & the Sweet Hereafter:

Old Time Rock and Roll

By Rebecca Johnson

Photos by Dara Rosenwasser

If you buy Jesse Sykes’ new album, Like, Love, Lust & The Open Halls of the Soul, do her a favor: get it on vinyl. Or at least on CD. As the music of a digital age becomes less and less tangible, Sykes still sees the album as part of a craftsman’s tradition. “Going into a record store isn’t just about nostalgia for me. A body of work is a body of work, and it’s meant to be heard in a certain context ... I used to open up a record and just inhale it, pore over every detail, look at all the photos and the artwork because they’re a part of the whole experience. It scares me to think people will lose that in the future.”

That’s why Sykes is at the printer’s on the day her album cover first rolls off the presses, keeping a close watch on the variations of grain, resolution and hue. “I’m a real stickler for these things,” she says, “and I’m very hands-on, because the bottom line is, no one’s going to care as much as you do.”

This old-fashioned, rolling-up-the-sleeves approach fits the image of Sykes and her band, the Sweet Hereafter, that has dominated reviews since the 2003 release of their first album, Reckless Burning. It’s the image of a starkly ramshackle form of gothic-Americana alt-country noir, like a clapboard church with peeling paint, full of plucked banjos, sobbing viola and Sykes’ hoarse and throaty voice reciting tales of woe. It’s a sepia-toned daguerreotype out of another century that overlaid the band’s sophomore effort, 2005’s Oh, My Girl, which Rolling Stone characterized as “backwoods,” imagining Sykes as a “frontier woman.”

Like such images, this one is simpler than the truth, and it gets a lot more complex with a listen to Sykes’ newest, out February 6 on Barsuk Records. Like, Love, Lust, whose lengthy name (actually a coupling of two song titles) suggests a postmodern sprawl, mixes up tempos and eras with more folk and psychedelic influences than ever before. The eponymous “LLL” cavorts with organ-driven electric blues before sliding into a jam worthy of Hendrix, while “You Might Walk Away” skips along with a folksy, harmonized insouciance. There have been a few changes in the lineup of the Sweet Hereafter, but not enough to write off this sonic shift to pure importation. Viola player Anne Marie Ruljancich is no longer a regular, and longtime drummer Kevin Wahrend has been replaced by Eric Eagle, but the group remains anchored by Sykes’ partner in life and crime, former Whiskeytown guitarist Phil Wandschen, along with upright bassist Bill Herzog.

Does this mean that the frontier woman has somehow stumbled into a time warp? Actually, Sykes says she has just gone back to her roots. As a teenager growing up in Mt. Kisco, New York during the ‘80s, Sykes admits she was a bit behind the times — “I mean, I wasn’t that into The Police.” But she also describes herself as a “typical classic rock kid” whose favorite band, “to the point of obsession,” was Lynyrd Skynyrd. Led Zeppelin was a close second. “I loved them. I adored them. They’re the reason I started making music.” Sykes, who collected plenty of jazz, rock, and blues records from a young age, is a bit bemused by the fact that she has become so widely known for a style that represents such a limited part of her musical interests.

“You don’t always get to pick what kind of music you end up making,” she comments, pointing out that what she calls the “Amazon mentality” of the music market (and music critics) often drives that pigeonholing. “I don’t even like some of the bands that people compare us to. Some of them I’ve never even listened to at all. But people would still rip us new assholes, saying that we were too much like them. And I’d think, ‘If they only knew...’ It’s frustrating. I’m at the point where I think anything they say about my music is pretty much the opposite of the way it actually is.”

A look back at Oh, My Girl confirms that its successor is building on some aspects of Sykes’ music that commentators who focus on the Americana angle have overlooked. Take the surf-guitar reverb and funky electric organ, for example, of “Troubled Soul,” or the coda of “Dreaming Dead,” a country spaghetti western-style tune. Make no mistake: Like, Love, Lust still presents a Sykes who is more prairie wife than rock ‘n’ roll babe. “Eisenhower Moon,” the album’s first song, is full of rambling harmonica that brings to mind a cowboy campfire, and high-country ballad “The Air is Thin” is a classic waltz through wind-swept desolation. But as Sykes puts it, “the beast is coming out,” partly owing to a refusal to get too comfortable. “If I wanted to keep making spacious, impressionistic-sounding records,” she says, “I would. But I feel as a writer and as an artist, I’m always interested in challenging myself and growing.”

Sykes is franker than most musicians about the hardships of the trade, from the creative process — which she compares to a kidney stone, but also admits is “the kind of pain you wouldn’t trade for the world” — to the nerve-wracking realities of living off quarterly receipts. “You’ll quit really fucking quickly if you’re not in it for the right reasons,” she says. “Very few people make a living at music. Very few people can get out there and tour.” She counts herself as one of the lucky ones. “If my plane crashes this Saturday,” she says — not a casual choice of metaphor; she’s terrified of flying — “I’ll still have been really blessed.”

Sykes is still processing Like, Love, Lust, for which she displays the cautious but bone-deep affection of a new mother after a long, painful labor. “I had a specific intent in mind that I reached for as I was recording these songs. And I really did reach. It caused me a lot of pain. It’s not my position to judge if I was successful or not in what I tried to do, but it doesn’t matter to me anymore. The one thing I finally realized is that I’ve been left intact and more excited than I’ve ever been.”

www.jessesykes.com

Jesse Sykes & the Sweet Hereafter hit the road in early February, with West Coast dates from the 7th to the 14th alongside reclusive surrealists Sparklehorse.