Jesse And Forever | I Was Electrocuted Seven Times and Now I Can See the Future
By Riley McShane, Contributor
It’s something of a miracle that an album filled with as much light, wonder, and modern romance as I Was Electrocuted Seven Times and Now I Can See The Future would come out in mid-December. Of 2020.
But thank goodness it did. Jesse Scheinin, the eponymous face of Jesse and Forever, came close to releasing it out almost 2 years prior, but decided to wait. He walks me through the album’s long and curious journey from a house near Lake Champlain, where he has resettled in the midst of the pandemic after several years in NYC.
The genesis of Seven Times came in 2015. After graduating from the Berklee School of Music and with one solo release under his belt, Scheinin reconnected with his old classmate Nick Hakim. While in school, they played in a band together, but Scheinin had since moved away from jazz saxophone and began composing instrumental music, working with large ensembles and incorporating choirs. This history informs the grand orchestral moments woven through the album which give it its unique shape - part classical, part pop, almost baroque at times.
As Scheinin explains it, he and Hakim didn’t begin collaborating with the intention of making a record, rather “we were mainly just experimenting, you know, working out different ideas. We got together every few weeks for the next couple of years.” It was Hakim, Jesse will admit, who brought a certain flair for production. “Nick is very DIY, he’s learned about production by doing things on his own. He ends up using equipment in a way that’s different from how other people do it.”
Jesse, for his part, was exploring an unconventional means of production: the mobile app Loopy, which allows any creator to layer looped recordings of singing, beatboxing and instrumentals. He did just that, and together he and Nick would flesh out these rough drafts. Two of the tracks from Seven Times, “SSYNSS” and “Starts 2 Show”, were born out of this process and remained more or less intact on the eventual record. The two artists worked away and slowly the idea for a project began to take shape while life moved along around them - they moved apartments, played in bands and worked odd jobs. Eventually, as the project itself picked up steam, Nick recommended that Jesse finish the record with another former Berklee-ite, Michael J Thomas III, member of esteemed Boston post-punk band Grass is Green and an experienced audio engineer.
Compared to Hakim’s more free-wheeling and esoteric production style, Scheinin remember’s Thomas III’s approach being, “more traditionalist, comparatively. Michael brought more of a perfectionist energy, since he is a professional.” Jesse and Micahel worked out of the Velvet Nipple, which the former affectionately describes as “a cave under the subway tracks in Bushwick.” The record was finished in 2018, but after shopping it around with a few record labels, Scheinin decided he wasn’t ready for the project to enter the world quite yet.
Almost every artist who has released any project since the world turned upside down in early 2020 has been asked how that feels: releasing new music into the strangest of circumstances, not being able to play their songs for a live audience. It’s an artistic quandary and a financial one, something with which artists and the surrounding music industry are grappling, the end of which seems barely in sight.
Despite this, Scheinin seems genuinely pleased to have self-released Seven Times when he did, noting “I’ve heard from complete strangers that this record, or certain songs, mean a lot to them, which is always nice. And there’s been people I haven’t heard from in a while who’ve reached out too.” The songs themselves have been given a new life online, after being worked over for so long and played to death in their former life.
On his website, Scheinin has liner notes for Seven Times, and they describe the album quite accurately as a “capsule of inspired moments.” He takes me back to stories that inspired some of the tracks, like “Porch Song” which was written on a small casio keyboard while he observed his neighbors from a balcony in Minas Gerais, Brazil where he was living at the time. Or the downbeat but wryly funny, “Smoke Weed” which captures the specific feeling of coming back to your place after visiting your parents across the country:
“I was in California and the folks were gettin’ old, I’m in New York and it’s gettin cold. I’m with the little ones trying to keep them calm. I’m on the floor, rubbing your shoulders when the electricity comes on.”
The album is laced with moments that are positively gorgeous, but it’s also unpredictable and self-aware enough not to squander the fun. Albums that are a long time in the making can feel overwrought, meticulous but lifeless like a ship built in a bottle. It’s an achievement that Seven Times remains so light on its feet, even after repeated listenings. It’s an album full of ideas and internal contrasts - the screeching, thumping, and shape-shifting “Wrote You A Poem” can hold hands with the moodier, piano-led “Victoria” and they don’t feel out of place together. The album is held together by the joy within its creation. Even the name, I Was Electrocuted Seven Times and Now I Can See The Future, is a sly nod to the sprawling and unfinished Crown Heights basement apartment where Scheinin lived for a time, where the place’s wiring was exposed and the artist would receive the occasional shock.
If Jesse can truly see the future, it remains bright for him: from his new home base in Essex, NY he is working on two new albums: one instrumentals, the other songs. Over the summer, he had a series of friends come and stay on the property and they made music videos together, taking advantage of the resources in his new environs - i.e. a local theater which was going unused allowed the small crew to film the video for “Victoria” there.
There was a collective desire to flip the page on 2020 - both personally and culturally, but I am grateful that Seven Times came at the close - not dour or needlessly heavy, but something offbeat and captivating, with some saxophone thrown in for good measure.