JESSE WALDMAN and MARC L’ESPERANCE: Album Release Celebration
SUNDAY, 22 September 2024 | DOORS AT 18:30, MUSIC FROM 19:00
Come celebrate the release of Jesse and Marc’s new album, “The Shimmering Divide” with an intimate performance by this great Vancouver duo. The two have been playing together, live and in the studio, for nearly twenty years. They have featured at many beloved (and sadly bygone) Vancouver bar haunts and made formidable appearances at the Burnaby Blues & Roots Festival and Mission Folk Music Festival. Their new album reflects the length and depth of their fraternal musical relationship, long-time friendship, unique melding of voices, and deep-rooted artistic trust.
About the New Album, “The Shimmering Divide”
“The Shimmering Divide” so softly unfolds and with such gentle trepidation, it feels just like one would imagine the graze of a swallowtail’s wing on the arm. A butterfly just so happens to be the chosen emblem symbolising Waldman’s grandmother, Joan, in later track ‘Monarch’. The gossamer colours of this delicate production immediately refract light and reverberate with life throughout each deftly constructed line for the album’s entirety. Reverent and candid storytelling is delivered with the acuity of Waldman’s poeticism; these are watercolours of people and places he has past encountered and truly cared about, expressed humbly and gorgeously, in such a multitude of moments – from the ethereal e-bow swells of ‘Come To Leave’, to the heartrending accents of cello on ‘Invisible’.
This sophomore album from Jesse Waldman, created with musical brother L’Esperance, is an acoustic based collection of alt-folk introspections of vulnerability, graciously unearthed for us listeners, and delivered with an unassuming earnestness, as well as fresh wisdom acquired since the rooms of moods and genres – indie folk, roots, and blues – that delighted us in Waldman’s debut album “Mansion Full of Ghosts” (2017). “The Shimming Divide” maintains the mastery of that guitar playing, writing craft, and clear ear for arrangements, but “Divide’s” pace appears more settled into a consistency that is both confident and richly lulling, much like that of a train, which some of the songs just happened to be born out of, in their jotting down in journals, swiftly captured as Jesse performed on VIA Rail from the West Coast to Ontario. Passengers were surprised by and warmly captivated
at the listening experience they were being treated to, leaning in closely around him, formerly strangers in a train car, all in the journey together now through the mountains and over the Prairies.
The intimacy of this tonally perfected pairing is that much more striking when the listener learns just how separated these best friends were during the majority of the song construction. Going back to those weighty days of 2020 and 2021, the two were separated in the practice of social-distancing, and turned to collaborating virtually, in the passing back and forth of takes, ideas, and edits, relying on their individual talents as highly respected audio engineers – and in some cases, making the most out of an apartment living room equipped with the charmingly quirky caveat of making sure to turn off the fridge before pressing ‘record’ – though Jesse can attest that did get old after awhile. The two wouldn’t find themselves face-to-face in the studio until early 2022.
What followed was the final surge of inspiration, when an artist notes they owe it to themselves and those involved to see a project to completion. There were shifts in the musical landscape, shifts in the definition of what ‘return to normal’ meant. Waldman navigated the choppy waters via the more recent penning of “End of the Tunnel”, a song where audience members find themselves chiming in on its candidly poignant yet hypnotically catchy refrain, “Where’s my light at the, end of the tunnel? Where’s my light at the, end of the tunnel? The one you promised, the one you promised to me”.