Darren Jessee – The Jane, Room 217 LP Bar/None Records

In late 2016, Jessee started writing and recording the songs that would become The Jane, Room 217 on a six-track in his New York City apartment.

“I thought it was all just song demos at first,” he says, but after a returning from a tour with Hiss Golden Messenger, he heard the material with new ears. “When I got back around to these songs, I realized it was something I cared about more than just demos.”

Jessee drove the tracks as they were to Richmond, where Trey Pollard of the Spacebomb Records group added strings and Jessee’s longtime collaborator Alan Weatherhead mixed; and for the most part, that’s how Jessee left it.

“I love sparse records,” Jessee says. “I grew up with Willie Nelson playing in the house, I was always a big fan of Leonard Cohen, the early Tom Waits records – just a mixed bag of artful music.”

Dreamy and intimate, The Jane, Room 217 evokes late night drives, low lights, and longing, as on the album’s opener, “Anything You Need,” where so much space is left around the notes that by the time strings swell up under the melody after the chorus, it’s an almost overwhelming rush, like a quiet revelation.

Arrangements on the album are pared down to nothing more than acoustic guitar, a few spare keyboard hooks, piano, Pollard’s strings, and Jessee’s expressive vocals. At once reserved and lush, Jessee’s wistful melodies are shot through with lyrical sparks, as in “All but a Dream,” where he takes a series of impressionistic flashes – “chill through the window screen,” “cortados in Mexico City,” “red tail lights of taxis, running through a summer rain,” “swimming in the briny sea” – and builds them into an epiphany much greater than the sum of its parts.

Quietly devastating, The Jane, Room 217 is a personal exploration of heartbreak and romance – made all the more powerful by its clear-eyed restraint.