About
One wintry Amsterdam afternoon in early 2024, a light guided Tessa Rose Jackson home. In the midst of an unproductive few months which this visionary Dutch-British singer, songwriter, artist and composer set aside to write her 5th album, a song struck her from nowhere. “The Lighthouse” was a beacon illuminating her way towards a place of intimacy, exposure and reassurance; of embracing her fears, her identity and her deepest, most morbid fascinations.
“I could see the album before it was made,” she says of the record she’d also name The Lighthouse. “I knew the world I wanted it to live in, a slightly more out of time world, a little bit of ghostly folklore. Talking about mortality means talking about life and how we live it, and how we use it and appreciate it.”
For the 32-year-old Jackson, it’s been a colourful, if turbulent, journey to The Lighthouse. Raised in Amsterdam to two lesbian mothers, she sadly lost one of her parents at a young age. “I learned to think about death and loss as something inescapable and vast very early on,” she says. “I always used to say: if you’re not a little bit scared of dying… do you really appreciate what it means to be alive?”
She found a release in music, struck by the certainty, at her first singing lesson aged 13, that she needed to perform forever. Via the Conservatorium van Amsterdam and the BRIT school in London – where a passion for production took hold – Jackson found herself modelled as a young pop star in Holland. Her 2013 album (Songs From) The Sandbox was a success for her at the age of 19, but also an instant albatross. “It took me on a rollercoaster,” she says. “I realised very quickly that I wanted to go much deeper into music, into much more interesting waters. I felt pushed into an image that wasn’t me.” Rejecting performative pop, for the next decade she retreated behind a kind of anti-pseudonym, recording simply as Someone, “a project about the creative side of everything and not image”.
Ultimately, Someone dissolved into the ether. “It did its work,” Jackson says. “It allowed me to develop in my own artistry, and allowing that to shape without too much outside pressure. I feel like it did its job now, and I can go back to my own name.” And revealed as Tessa Rose Jackson again, she began peeling back the layers even further.
The Lighthouse is a generation spanning affair. “The Bricks That Make the Building”, with its brushes of harp, pastoral vocal melody and ghostlike backing vocals, looks back to our shared ancestry; the story of a spirit returning to their home on a hill and finding peace that a new family live there now, considering their own heritage and meaning. “It’s also from the perspective of the child in the house thinking about the bricks that make the building,” she explains. “What’s the blood that runs in my veins? It’s not only mine. It’s a lot of people that have come before me that have done things and shaped things for me. It’s a musing on that, and also a sense of gratitude towards the lives that that allowed me my life.”
A bright beam of reassurance from the darkness, The Lighthouse is both timely and timeless, intimate and universal, sumptuous and spare. A thing of stature and beauty gleaming in the pitch. “It’s an album that’s about death, but not in that very dark sense,” Tessa says. “For me, it’s also very much about life – the celebration of life and allowing yourself to think about these things.” And on the cliff face of modern alt-folk, it stands tall.
