When the stage lights go out on Friday evening in the Berlin Huxley’s new world and applause in the echo of the hall in the capital city with the calls and whistles of the fans, Jessie Reyez lights up one last time among the headlights. Your white summer dress lure your long pitch black and also black leather platform boots – for a moment you illustrate the opposites between innocence and rebellion, elegance and fury. A few minutes later, in the hollow corridors behind the stage, the Canadian singer has to swipe tears of emotion from the otherwise rather defiant face, she had just thanked a fan that she spotted in the front row every time in the front row.
For Jessie Reyez, 34 years old, Canadian singer-songwriter, concerts are as important as the creative process in the studio. “But the studio is a sacred place where you create something out of the unmanifested and bring something into the world that has not existed an hour ago. And as it were, it also feels at concerts as if you are building memories.
The minute hand on the old plastic clock nourishes midnight, but Reyez is wide awake after her appearance and no less energetic than hours before. “I am present, and my fans are too – at that moment we create reality together. I love it when I am given the opportunity to be present at the moment. If you make a mistake, it just goes on. And it just goes on, it just goes on. I love the transient nature of the stage.”
“A whole damned cauldron full of life experiences”
Stage moments may be fleeting, but their career, on the other hand, and Reyez seems to surprise that every now and then, she now seems to be continuously continuing. Born in Toronto as a child of Colombian immigrants, Reyez started writing music at school. In 2017 she released her first EP “Kiddo”, followed in 2019 the second EP “Being Human in Public” and two collaborations with Eminem on his album “Kamikaze”. A year later she came together again with Eminem – for a joint song on her debut album “When Love Came to Kill Us”. In the meantime, she has worked with Sam Smith, Lil Wayne and 6 -Lack, was on tour with Billie Eilish, Halsey and Jhené Aiko – and not least published her third studio album “Paid in Memories” in May this year. “The album tells of growth, of reflection, a story of expressing its own humanity. “It is a whole damned cauldron full of life experiences.”
Be present at the moment
Memory as a currency is the idea behind the album that Reyez also tries to implement as a principle of life. “I do my best to take this as my northern star, not only on stage – also in life. In the way I interact with my family, with nature,” she says, and lifts her voice to arrive against the noise of conversations that penetrates from the hall. “I always try to be as present as possible” – she interrupts herself, turns irritated, and asks her manager to close the door. “That is what I mean. I try to focus my attention on the moment, so I gather my consciousness as concentrated as possible. This is the best way to tackle life.”
Being present at the moment, the artist hopes that her fans can also be found during the show. Leaving the hall happier when it was entered, it was introduced as a rule directly at the beginning of the concert. Feeling alive in Reyez ‘Welt should not be a sentimental friday evening hobby for instagram-related well-being. Rather, Reyez seems to be the concentrated power of searching for a fulfilled, brutally recognized existence. And so some of their songs and their stage performance are attacked by a memento Mori, through which their light -footed pop melodies carry it seriously as a city through their cemeteries.
“To think about death is very natural for me”
Do you think a lot about death? I ask her. “Every day,” she replies with a secondary naturalness and smoothes the wrinkles on her dress smoothly. Filigree colorful flowers on white fabric, a soft pink loop in the neckline, and over the neck, a heavy gold chain. “I think about dying every day. I was lucky enough to be raised by a mother, the spirituality always kept at our side. And that makes the curtain very thin,” says Reyez.
She grew up in a household, she says, where every day was pronounced how sacred life is. “Thinking about death is very natural for me,” she says, shrugging her shoulders. The idea of approaching death also found its way into her debut “Before Love Came to Kill Us”. It should be a catalyst to remind people of the nature of life – and that death is inevitable, she says. Because the majority of people go through life on autopilot.
Reyez tells a woman stories
Jessie Reyez goes through life with a sense of spirituality, family and character, which is also deeply rooted in Colombian culture. She learned early on to be herself, to stand by and to express herself freely and creatively – free of the judgments of other people. This is convinced that she is not a matter of course as a woman. And it is the experiences of the woman who form the heart of her music and whom she gives a voice through her lyrics. A voice, which, the mostly female crowd in Huxley’s new world, shows to be heard.
Her songs tell about it, says Reyez, what it is like to be a woman in this world: “From the moment you come to puberty and realize that the world looks at you differently. From experience when you walk across the street in a short skirt and feel that you have a million dollars in your pocket in a round in which every man is introduced and skipping his own. Remember and say loudly, hello to get to know you. “From the experience of receiving wisdom from older women. From the experience of being an adult woman and seeing a young girl who is on and about being grown up and does not yet know that the war means – that you would like to warn it so much, but do not want to prepare it, but do not want to take her innocence.
More women in power
Songs such as “Cudn’t Be Me”, “Figures” or “Beggin 4 Luv” tell a song about it. Jessie Reyez embodies female self -empowerment, feminine resistance and the fact that stories of women are woven with a strong needle. And last but not least, that creative rooms and communities like on Friday evening in Huxley’s new world are small steps towards the necessary change.
Jessie Reyez wants more women in power – because they could simply and simply better. “The feminine essence includes care. We women naturally tend to empathy and less violence,” says Reyez. “There are so many men in power, and we are fighting in so many, and that is related. If women were in power, they would have a much stronger feeling for who they are sending to war. Namely their own children. Not that fathers do not feel that way. But I think that the male ego tends to be aggression.”
Reyez knows better than many others what it means to seek success as a young woman in the music industry. In 2017 she published the short film “Gatekeeper”, which addressed sexism and exploitation in the music industry. It was based in particular on her experience with the music producer Noel “Detail” Fisher, who was accused by several women, including the artist Bebe Rexha, sexual misconduct and rape. Compared to 2017, she feels safer as a woman in the music industry today, she says. “We have arrived on one level on which people feel shame for it, and that was not before. The trend is in the right direction. If only one raises the voice, it can become a wave. That destroys my call?”
“I learned to love in Spanish”
But Reyez also observes with concern how sexual misconduct has been normalized at least in the USA at the political level. And the Migration policy of the United States under Donald Trump is oppressed with horror and outrage. She believes that she was not apolitical as a musician, Reyez called into the cheering crowd during the concert. During her US tour in the past few weeks, she had her fans called “Fuck Ice” in the choir, today she made it “pure love” because she says she came to the conclusion in a conversation with her mother, after all, more split was not the solution.
But as a Colombian daughter, she feels with all those who have to live in the USA in daily fear of deportation. Because her Latin American descent is proud. “Latinos and Latina’s love warmer. We are more passionate, our love is firmer. And that comes out in my music,” says Reyez. “I learned to love in Spanish.”
The raids of the immigration police, the countless arrests and deportations of people of Latin American descent – or merely Latin American reading – therefore look forward to it in the USA. “I would be blind if I were not worried. But I also learned a tendency to unity from my mother. We have to show empathy to build bridges,” says Reyez.
Utopian, but right: empathy is the solution
When she was emigrated to the USA with her family from Canada in teen age, the bureaucratic process took 16 years. “People have to understand that you are privileged when you are born in a country that does not experience violence or politically oppression. People always like to say that immigration is okay, but make it right, on the legal way. Imagine you and your family flee from violence – you wait 16 years?” Asks Reyez. “Some people do not have enough empathy to understand that not everyone is privileged. And that leads to hatred. It may be utopian, but I believe that one can show empathy to everyone, and thus overcome hatred and division. Emotional effort can make mountains.”
And that showed Jessie Reyez with her concert in Berlin this Friday evening in Huxley’s new world, which was not only an evening of music, but also of tolerance, liberation and acceptance. And when the fans leave the heated hall of the Huxley and step into the cool Berlin night air, they go into the night with a little lighter heart when they entered it. They finally promised Jessie Reyez.