Jess Sylvester melds all his influences in his most fully realized album
In the fall of 2020, singer/songwriter Jess Sylvester finished work on a new album he would name Hella Love. It was his third album under the Marinero moniker—Spanish for “sailor,” a tribute to his father. The gentle songs he wrote for Hella Love are about his family and their connection to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he grew up. While he mixes in his appreciation for Brazilian samba in the arrangements, most have their roots in the folk traditions of his mother’s Mexican American heritage. After he finished recording the album, he passed it around to friends and fellow musicians. According to Under the Radar, Shana Cleveland of La Luz asked, “Who’s putting it out? Can I pass this on?” She sent it to her label, Hardly Art, who signed Sylvester and released Hella Love, his first album on a major imprint.
Hella Love, with its romantic connection to the Bay Area, would serve as a farewell to the city of his youth. When Hardly Art released the album in May 2021, Sylvester had already moved to his new home in Los Angeles. As the world climbed out of pandemic lockdown, Sylvester experienced his newly adopted city through a daily life of culture, sights, and sunshine. These images became the narrative for his next album as he explained to BFF.fm earlier this year. “Drinking coffee, going outside, seeing palm trees, and really feeling excited by that. Feeling like ‘Oh my God, it’s like these things that I’ve seen growing up in film.’ It resonated with me as an early theme of something. And I didn’t feel like I wanted to be like ‘Mr. L.A.’ and write from that perspective, like I knew everything about L.A. since I’d only been there for a year. I wanted to write about it in an abstract way, and about the relationship I was finding with it.” He named his new album La La La.
Songs on Hella Love tell of how Sylvester’s parents made The Bay their home. His Irish American sailor father from Massachusetts, docked in San Francisco and met his mother, who lived in the Mission District. They settled in Marin County and Jess grew up connected to San Francisco and Mexico, where he often visited his mother’s family. Early musical inspiration came through The Beatles and The Beach Boys and his mother’s records. “My mom listened to music, a lot of vinyl in the house,” he told Under the Radar in 2021. “Just as much as she was turning me on to Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston or The Beach Boys, there was also more traditional music being played. Linda Ronstadt had an album at the time called Canciones de Mi Padre that was very popular and there was traditional Mexican music being played as well.” The groups Malo, Santana, and Trio Los Panchos were also part of his early playlist.
In high school, his interest switched to grunge and punk, and he played in several punk/hardcore bands. He also co-founded the group Francisco y Madero with friends in Mexico from one of his trips to Guadalajara. Francisco y Madero laid the groundwork for the music he creates with Marinero, along with becoming a songwriter and a bandleader. “Before I even picked up a guitar, I wanted to be a songwriter,” he told Content Magazine. “I don’t know why, as I didn’t have [role] models or friends that were songwriters. Spending time in Mexico really helped me grasp my own concept of identity, both musically and personally. It allowed me to make Latinx music and pull from influences that I grew up hearing in my home.”
The mix of styles is clear in his first full-length album Chican@, a low-fi effort released on Bandcamp in 2016. There’s psychedelic guitar, Latin textures, and lyrics that speak to Sylvester’s own blend of cultures. For the followup, Trópico de Cáncer (2019), released through the San Jose label Needle in the Groove, Sylvester lets you know he’s been listening to a lot of Brazilian music. “The Tropicàlia art, music, film movement is all very inspiring,” he told tonitruale.com in 2021. “I love Os Mutantes, Jorge Ben, Caetano Veloso, Chico Buarque, and many others. But I mainly just love their songs, production, and cool string and horn arrangements on their albums.” These influences carried over to Hella Love, but he also found inspiration from Ennio Morricone soundtracks and Brian Wilson, even recreating an incident from Wilson’s Smile sessions. “One day I showed up to the studio with a bunch of firefighter hats and I was trying to get the band to wear them,” he remembered. “They weren’t down, but I was wearing one.”
On La La La, released in February on Hardly Art, Sylvester fuses LA’s cruising culture and Latin music with a cool, breezy beach vibe. It’s best represented in the track “Cruz,” which has Jess motoring around the City of Angels. Other songs find him looking at the city’s film industry, with titles that give away part of the story: “Cinema Lover,” and “Hollywood Ten.” Sylvester even writes his own James Bond theme on “Die Again, Yesterday,” arranged to sound like a dramatic score. He told BFF.fm, “I think the approach that I took on this record, it was like, playing around with a theme or genre of mystery, or a noir, or what I think of when I think of L.A., or the types of sounds or types of artists that have inspired me that are from a certain era of L.A. that I really appreciate.”
La La La is Sylvester’s most elaborate production with several guest musicians, including Shana Cleveland, Chris Cohen, and Eduardo Arenas (Chicano Batman). Songs like “Dream Suite” and “Sea Changes” have beautiful soundscapes, but deep in the lyrics are Sylvester’s own struggle with addiction. The 40ish musician admits he started drinking at a young age, but he has been sober for over twenty years. Hardy Art describes “Dream Suite” as “a love song for the down and out, for those struggling with letting go of their past in search of a brighter future.” Most satisfying, though, must be the Latin infused tracks. The food obsessed “Taquero” is full of private jokes, and “Pocha Pachanga” sounds like a lost Santana song. “I’m really proud of some of the genres I picked,” he said. “Like my mom is so stoked that I did this salsa song and she loves it.”