JULESY SHARES MUSIC VIDEO FOR NEW SINGLE “LEFT BEHIND” VIA STRONG PLACE MUSIC
Photo Credit: Mpanja Rwakibale
SEPTEMBER 5, 2024 — New York alternative folk-pop singer songwriter Julesy has shared a music video and new version of “Left Behind,” her second single via Brooklyn-based label Strong Place Music (Elvis Perkins, Lavender Diamond). Along with recent single “Mouthing Words,” the track was originally included on This Current Self Intervention, an EP of songs written during COVID lockdown. “They were both quickly conceived as a kind of cathartic spew of songs that were pent up,” Julesy explains. “I was alone in my childhood bedroom making all the tracks, so they were originally all produced by me, and consisted mostly of software instruments. When I got the chance to redo them, I really wanted to incorporate more live instruments, especially since I’ve been playing these songs live with my band for a few years now.”
On the new recordings, lived-in, acoustic instrumentation is effortlessly layered with aerial electronics. The conversational lyrics take on new resonance in Julesy’s flexible mezzo-soprano range, her preternatural technique allowing her to convey messages unencumbered by the haze of modern life. Strummy, sturdy verses still hover over pools of feedback and electric bass, her most direct tracks delicate homages to a myriad influences and melody-first songwriting.
Of the new single, Julsey offers: “Left Behind was the song that I made first, starting as a bassline and then the rest was added in. I was feeling super lost after graduating college during covid, feeling like I was no longer attached to anything I knew, and was really struggling to feel a sense of belonging in my own actions. I tend to be super headstrong, so a lot of the lyrics are me addressing myself, questioning my own will and my own identity. The production track was really inspired by some of my favorite artists like Imogen Heap and The Japanese House.”
In 2020, Julesy was curled up in her childhood bedroom outside of Boston, the COVID-19 lockdown having knocked her out of routine and presented an anti-climatic end to her undergraduate studies. Away from acting school, she felt an internal conflict—she had plenty to say but nowhere to put it. “While I was at school, I was training to be a canvas for a character. However, I always seemed to bring the character to me, instead of vice versa,” she explains. “I think when I was house-bound during Covid, my sense of self was completely confused, and surrendering myself to a character became harder and harder.”
Julesy had written songs since she was little, fiddling on guitar and later recording rudimentary vocals on her computer. “Music was always second nature, a way to communicate that felt absolutely true to me,” the daughter of a film composer father and a music director mother (who taught Julesy and countless others how to sing) fondly recalls. “When I graduated school and everything seemed so insecure, I turned once again to music to unravel what I was dealing with, to try to make sense of a life I didn’t plan.” That meant revisiting early demos and fleshing them out into an EP while compiling a playlist of inspirations like Caroline Polachek and The Japanese House.
When Strong Place Music presented Julesy with the opportunity to re-record that original foray, she focused on honing ideas, not reshaping them, diving back into the raw post-academia wreckage with some sobering distance and the support of a mixing and mastering team. With these new releases, Julesy is establishing herself as a musician who can channel her most personal scrapes into anthemic songs that act as slices of youthful uncertainty: exciting, devastating, and hooky in equal measure.
“Left Behind” Single Artwork