Jesse DeNatale - The Wilderness (2020)

The Wilderness to Paradise

Jesse and I recently sat in his garden under sweltering skies, where I listened for the first time to The Wilderness. He strung a pair of speakers in a potted tree in front of us: The fruits of his labor, the emanating music returning to its natural habitat of the towering pines around us. Why do I love this record? It’s because The Wilderness contains so much of our moment. The wilderness is a fitting way to picture how lost we can feel sometimes. And from within every symbolic form the wilderness takes in Jesse’s music, his voice is reassuring, redemptive—it is light, shifting shape in the darkness as a melodious spiritual missive: We have everything we need…
In The Wilderness, Jesse pursues his muse in multiple realms where he allows himself to be lost. And found. Everywhere around, there is the electricity of life and genius, the magnetic irresistibility of the abyss, the lulling gravity of the cosmos. There are aching and joyous moments excavated from lost pasts: The gaze of two lovers meeting eyes through nightclub smoke; the skies of gold over a West Coast which is both cradle and grave to the constellated hopes of America’s big-hearted searchers; there is the artist’s model tossing back her head in the charged air of a quiet studio, sending an oceanic swell into the artist’s heart—from paint to brush to canvas, and out through color and composition to countless other hearts. It all swirls upward, intertwining in threads of poetry, emotion, and breath: Now-gone lovers dance on the worn floorboards of gallerias torn away by time but restored in reverie.
Even when the wilderness becomes steeped in melancholy, “Step Lively” is Jesse’s keynote imperative. He reminds us that we are elements of—and elemental to—the transgalactic collage of nebulae, stars, planets, dust. We are the light in the darkness.
The overarching story of The Wilderness reverberates from the opening song, feeds through all the rest, and resounds back from the last. “Paradise,” the album’s closing track, feels like a relic pulled from the ashes of a century now long gone, when America’s postcard would not have included the postscript that it has lost its soul somewhere along the way. “Paradise” laments the specific loss of a California town destroyed not long ago by vicious flames. “The Ballad of Oscar Grant” distills such a conflagration to a single painful beat of our history’s darker and poisoned pulse, which even now still repeats all too often.
Upon my first listen, the resounding message I heard coming from deep in The Wilderness was to find, to follow your muse. The muse is the tiny divine light we pursue around each darkening bend in the woods as we seek inspiration. In so doing, we hone our excellence and build Paradise inside of ourselves, in spite of, perhaps because of, the wilderness. - Shaun Bond