Interview with Singer-Songwriter Jesse Norell on "Aorta Borealis"
Review by: Andy Ellis, Writer @andysmileyjay
Edited by: Eric Martin, Writer/Assistant Editor @eamartin95
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Singer-songwriter Jesse Norell’s new album Aorta Borealis is special. Not only is it his return to music, but it also chronicles the struggles he and his family went through when his daughter Alyssa was diagnosed with CHD (Congenital Heart Disease). It’s a concept record of the most personal kind, dealing with all the emotions, and Norell hopes it raises awareness and aids in reducing the stigma of those living with Down syndrome.
I was able to talk at length to Norell about the songs, recording process, and the release show that is taking place on Friday April 8th, 2022 at the Parkway Theater. The interview has been edited for clarity.
Andy Ellis (Melodic Noise): “What was the inspiration for the album's title?”
Jesse Norell: “Aorta is a reference to the heart. Alyssa's open heart surgeries and the journey to repair a broken heart is a central theme. Borealis is a reference to the northern lights.
The northern lights can only be seen against the backdrop of darkness. I wanted to tell this entire story, not just skip to the end. I wanted to show beauty, even in the darkness, and the joy of outlasting the night to fully appreciate the sunrise.”
A.E.: “When did feelings about the journey start forming into song ideas?"
J.N: “I had some health issues myself, so even me being comfortable playing music was tricky. I was still a guitar teacher, but I got diagnosed with early onset rheumatoid arthritis. I could still play, but like I remember the first time I realized that I was working with a student, and I snapped my fingers to count them in, and it hurt.
And I went ‘That’s not supposed to hurt,’ and then very quickly I couldn’t play on the floor with my kids, and I couldn’t bend my knees and I was like, ‘Oh, dear. Something’s really wrong with me.’ And I couldn’t get it diagnosed, and I couldn’t pay that much attention to myself for a good period of time because I was so focused on my daughter and her health struggles.
Then when I got on medication and got better again and was able to feel normal again, I felt an obligation in a good way to play music and write songs again. So I booked myself at a Dunn Bros coffee shop in Arden Hills (Minnesota) in January of 2019 to play a couple of sets of music. It was a lot of covers, and I did one set of covers and one set of songs I had written.
And in the week leading up to that, a sort of comeback coffee shop solo performance, the first song on the record came to me, right? I was like, ‘Well, if I write this now, people are gonna have to listen to it, because I have a thing booked.’ So “What to Tell You” was the first one that came about.
It was just a song about the day my daughter was born, expecting it to be a joyous occasion. I found out that night that she had Down syndrome, which I had mixed feelings about. Then I found that she was going to need heart surgery, which I had all negative feelings about. So I wrote the song about that, and it doesn’t sugarcoat anything, and it doesn’t say, ‘But in the end everything will be alright.’ There’s like no silver lining really in that song.
And I thought, once all the smoke cleared and everything was so much better, she survived her heart surgery, and she got strong, and started being able to be a normal kid again, I got better, our family situation got so much better, ‘Maybe that song shouldn’t live by itself. Maybe people want to hear the rest of the story, and I could make a record where that’s the first song. But I get to tell the whole journey, not just one sort of difficult moment of it.'
So I put it on Kickstarter to see if people wanted to hear the rest of the story, and it was successful. And then COVID hit, and I thought, ‘Well, if it wouldn’t have gone through the Kickstarter phase, I would’ve said let’s wait this whole COVID thing out, or let’s maybe not do this.’ But people had donated their money and they said we want to hear the rest of the story, and so I wrote the rest of it.”
Jesse and Alyssa Norell, photo by Emily Woodburn
A.E.: “The first song on the album, what I noticed is that when it comes to the sonics, the production, I can really feel you getting this call, and then you’re kind of in this haze of like nothing else exists. This is all that’s going through your mind. I’m wondering, when you’re putting together this song and others like “Together,” “Recovery,” ‘Darkness to Light,” “The Lucky Few,” could you talk about arranging and creating these songs? Because it all sounds very deliberate.
J.N.: “I mentioned the first song was “What to Tell You,” and that was always going to be the first song. Then when I put it out there on Kickstarter, I thought people should get an example of what’s going to happen near the end. So I wrote “You Are,” which is track nine, and I didn’t know if that was going to be the last song, or just somewhere near the end.
Then I had sort of a framework for a beginning and an end. And then once the Kickstarter succeeded, I started filling in the gaps. Every song or riff idea I had was being put into two categories. Is this the dark half of the record or the more joyous, lighter half, and trying to figure that out.
One of my first ideas was that I wanted to write a lullaby. I automatically assumed as soon as I got that idea, that that was going to go on the joyous half of the album, and I was just going to celebrate Alyssa with this little lullaby. And then where that ended up fitting was this chapter about… there was this really dark chapter.
It ended up being more of like a dark lullaby, which when you think of like “Rockabye Baby” or something like that, a lot of lullabies are actually pretty dark. And so I felt like that fit conceptually. And so that was my first step with every song: Okay, which half of the album does this fit on? What part of the story is it?
From there it was just what do I want to say? The first seven songs I want to tell this story, and figuring out what the necessary chapters were. And the second half is how do we show people the other side? How do we want to celebrate? And sort of thinking about the almost, like, keywords that are used within the community.
You mentioned “The Lucky Few,” which is almost like a hashtag that the Down syndrome community has adopted. It was kind of coined by this woman named Heather Avis. She’s an author and has written some great books and has two kids with Down syndrome.
So I was like okay, so we can celebrate Alyssa with a song like this, and it just sort of went from there. And there was a song where I celebrated my son and everything that he put to the side in terms of his upbringing so that his sister could get more attention. I wrote a song about my marriage and how that survived and celebrating my wife. And then there’s a song called “Welcome to Sydney” at the end that sort of wraps everything up.
A.E.: “Could you talk a little more about the production for songs like “What To Tell You,” “You Are,” “Together,” and “The Lucky Few”? Could you dig into making those sounds the way you heard in your head and creating the atmosphere for each song?”
J.N.: “”What to Tell You” was a song that my collaborators kept telling me to keep simple to not lose the magic of the acoustic demo I made. My bass player Clint Phillips even liked that the click track was bleeding into the mic through the headphones, and wanted me to leave that in. In the end I wanted to give it a good amount of polish with a string quintet (played by Ed Harper and Katherine Sullivan) and other instrumentation, but the goal of everyone involved was to have the simplicity of the demo come through.
“What to Tell You” sets the mood for the first half of the record, beautiful and a little dark. While you can hear some beauty and hope in it ("I hope someday we'll have a clearer view"), it's somber and pulls no punches as it discusses the night Alyssa was born and when my wife Keri told me her diagnosis. I invited my wife in to sing harmony at the end of the song, which adds a lot to the music and the meaning of the song for me.
About halfway through writing “Together,” I found a delay setting in my Line6 HX Stomp guitar pedal that bounced around in really interesting ways, so I started rewriting the song around that delay sound. “Together” also heavily features a guitar pedal I bought for this record called the Digitech FreqOut, which made a lot of the whistling and feedback sounds.
The post chorus features a Digitech Whammy, which switches octaves with a lever controlled by your foot. That guitar line is doubled by my voice, and I love how the two interweave and get lost in each other. The drums in the verse are really busy at first, followed by a lot of space.
All of this combines to make a song that feels intense, like gathering your resolve for a long journey ahead. To me it sounds hopeful but still contains a lot of uncertainty.
“You Are” started as a strummed acoustic guitar song, but I challenged myself to recreate the song with mainly electric guitar riffs and no strumming. That created space for me to have a lot of guitar ideas happening at the same time and even some "dueling" guitars at the end!
Steve Goold decided the song needed more of a punk rock feel so he double-timed the drum part on the choruses, and it brought a ton of extra energy. Chris Mason added a twinkly synth part that really brought some extra polish and beauty. It simultaneously pulls on my heartstrings while being fun and easy to listen to throughout.
“The Lucky Few” is the first song on the joyful side of the album, and I love how it starts with whistling - a carefree sort of activity you don't do much of when your days feel stuck in "life or death," "fight or flight" mode. This is a very playful, bouncy song where I get to mess around and have fun again. I don't usually do guitar solos but I actually have two in this song.
There are also three references to other popular songs I make in ”The Lucky Few,” and hiding easter eggs for people to find is another playful thing which would not have fit on earlier tracks about surviving dark times. Chris Carr of LaSalle Studios did a great job mixing this track, and I think the drums sound especially huge on this song.
A.E.: “Listening to the record, there are so many layers and nuances. Could you talk about the pre-production that went into this to make sure it was going to go as smoothly as possible and not be complete chaos?”
J.N.: “It was definitely a process. I would say writing the album wasn’t as hard as everything else, like just figuring out how to record when the pandemic was going on. For example, one of the things that I had to figure out is I like to play electric guitars through some pretty loud amplifiers.
I was going to do that while my kids were at school, and then they didn’t go to school for 500 and some days after that, and so I needed to buy some gear so that I could actually have it sounding good through a pair of headphones directly into the computer. So that was more the tricky part, and finding people who were going to help me. One of the things I did is I felt overwhelmed by the mixing process.
I was starting to get comfortable with the home recording process. But I get in my head too much, and I never finish a mix because I feel like it’s never done. I needed to hand this to somebody else.
So I found Chris Carr through a friend of a friend, and we ended up connecting a bunch and we just emailed literally hundreds of thousands of words back and forth, and sent different mixes, and that’s how it got mixed. So that was really the tricky part.
In terms of just the writing of it, um, it’s my life. Especially the first half of the record, I just wrote my life and it came out relatively easily. I wrote the whole thing in, besides those first two songs that I mentioned, I wrote the other 10 in two or three months. It happened pretty quickly.
Then it was the recording and mixing and getting all the tracks from everybody else that contributed. And then getting records pressed and everything else that came along with that that took the longest.
A.E.: “These are incredibly personal songs. When you get them out, whether it’s lyrics or a rough demo, are you feeling any kind weight off your shoulders? How is this affecting you personally and mentally?”
J.N.: “Yeah, thanks for that. It’s overall been really good. I’ve had to face down some of the hardest parts of my life by making this.
When you make a record, you have to listen to the songs over and over again. When you get a new mix you listen to it. You put down a new layer of guitar or vocals, you listen to it. And so just listening back to my own words that I wrote from some of the most difficult portions of my life, especially for the first half, I almost had to build up sort of an emotional endurance.
It really helped me, I don’t want to use the word desensitized, because I don’t think that’s what happened. But I told myself the story enough that I started to get used to it, and started to accept what happened, but I still sometimes get sad, it’ll catch me off guard and I’ll still cry sometimes when I listen to parts of the story.
Like you said it is very emotional and very personal, but it’s been a really good thing for me, and it seems like so far that people that have listened to it, it’s been really good for the people that connect with it. People have told me things, like personal trauma that they’ve had in their life that they haven’t told other people, because they connected with the story in a way that made them feel comfortable doing that. You know, people have told me that, ‘You wrote the soundtrack to my life.’
I think that’s really cool because I am not the only one with this story, and I am not the only one who's had a kid who barely survived and was in and out of the hospital and got to experience joy after all of that. My story isn’t terribly unique in that way.
But not everybody has a happy ending, right? Not everybody has the end of the story that I have, and I wanted to be able to celebrate that. I wanted people to know that I’m very fortunate, and that our family is very lucky to have come through that.”
A.E.: “I got my start as a lyricist, and so one thing I noticed lyrically is there’s not a hard focus on ‘Hey, this all has to rhyme’ as it traditionally does, but it still works. And that’s not easy. Was that conscious or that's just how it came out?”
J.N.: “I feel like for a long time I felt like everything had to rhyme, but I find a lot of times it’s about internal rhyme or slant rhyme. I’m happy with any of that, and I’ll just write it down and I will sing it and I will think ‘Oh, that sounds good.’ And if I don’t notice that it doesn’t rhyme then it’s fine, and I move on.
I was able to discover that, but it’s funny to even hear you say that because I’m like ‘Wait, aren’t I still really stuck on everything that has to rhyme?’ So I feel like that’s actually pretty cool that you notice that. That makes me feel good.”
A.E.: “It reminds me a little of Father John Misty. There are a lot of times when his lyrics won’t rhyme, but his voice is good so it doesn’t really matter. It shouldn’t work but it does. I do wonder if it’s because it’s your raw emotion and experience put into songs. And it’s like well it doesn’t need to rhyme because it’s completely real.”
J.N.: “Yeah, I think that’s a lot of it. I wanted to be able to tell the story and the story sort of supersede’s the poetry of it. I think if you put poetry first sometimes your story can change. I started listening to a lot of different songwriting podcasts, and I would hear a lot of people say, “Well, you start with an idea, but then you let the song take it in a completely different direction, and it becomes about something else.’
I’m like well if I did that I would never finish, because I would keep writing songs that didn’t go on this record. So I sort of had to stick to the plan, and sometimes that meant, you know, it’s more about the storytelling than anything else. But I think you’ll agree this doesn’t sound like a Bob Dylan record or anything like that. It’s kinda got a combination of, I mean, there’s poetry in there, but I never wanted to make it so vague that people couldn’t understand it.
And one of my inspirations for that, something that encouraged me is I discovered the album Punisher by Phoebe Bridgers. She’s so tremendously specific in her lyrics, but people resonate with her lyrics like it’s their own story. Even though she says exactly the specifics of what’s going on in her life. People insert themselves in the story always.
So I’m like, ‘Okay, great! That works for her. Maybe it’ll work for me, too. I can tell my story and people can make it their own as opposed to me being extra vague and hoping that that helps people put themselves in the story.’ I don’t think that that’s necessary. I think people are going to grab onto it anyway.
A.E.: “When you were actually recording these or even as you’re getting ready to perform them as well, are there any that were either challenging mentally, emotionally to record or ones that you’re maybe a little nervous to perform live because of how personal it is?”
J.N.: “Yeah, like all of them. (Laughs) Most of them have a risk of me melting down. But what I noticed is that when you have a community of people that’s joining you, it’s not as dark or hard to get through. Because you feel the energy of the people that are alongside you and cheering you on. It’s more when I’m doing this by myself that I just spontaneously find myself crying.
But I did this really cool thing when the record was done, but it wasn’t pressed and it wasn’t ready. It didn’t have a release date. I sent a message out to all my Kickstarter supporters that I was going to do a Zoom album release party. So we were just going to listen to the record together over Zoom, and I’d stop at every few songs and answer questions and just talk about the inspiration behind songs and stuff.
That was when I first noticed, ‘Oh, this isn’t quite so heavy when you can come together as a community.’ And I’m expecting that when we really get to perform these live shows that that’s going to happen as well then. I’m going to feel that positivity from the audience, and feel that community and that connectedness. And that’s gonna help me not just completely break down in the middle of a song.”
A.E.: “There is one cover on here called “How it Feels to be Something On.” Can you talk about this song and what it means to you?”
J.N.: “Yes. “How it Feels to be Something” is a cover by a band called Sunny Day Real Estate. It’s written by this guy named Jeremy Enigk. And the chapter that I felt like needed to go there, it’s track five. So track 4 ‘Run the Long Race’ is about heart surgery number one, basically. Handing Alyssa off to the surgeon and telling her, ‘You need to come back from this.’
And then the step that happened after that I felt like I needed to write, was seeing her after surgery for the first time. Because the surgeon says, ‘Yay! She lived! You can go see her now.’ And you go see her, and you see that she’s hooked up to about 30 different machines, and I’m not even exaggerating. I believe that was the number, and she’s got wires everywhere.
So the line that kept coming up to me was one of my favorite songs, this song that we’re talking about, and the line is, ‘A field of wires. We’ll see what it’s worth to walk.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, so maybe what I’ll do is I will just repurpose that line. Like nobody would mind that if I use ‘A field of wires.’ I’ll just rebuild a song around it.
And I just couldn’t do it, because it was…I don’t know. I don’t know how to explain why I couldn’t do it. But I ended up looking into the lyrics of the song and I thought, ‘You know what? This really sums it up quite well.’ Because at a broad level it’s about somebody who has had a mountaintop experience, only to fall all the way back down.
And that to me was like, ‘Well, that’s this feeling that I have.’ It feels like well everything you sort of strived for doesn’t really matter. This is the only thing that matters. Is getting this little girl alive and well again.
So I just ended up contacting Jeremy Enigk and being like, ‘Hey, is this okay if I use this one?’ And he was like, ‘Yep. That’s fine. Just go through the proper channels. That’s great.’ And so I kinda had his blessing on it, and moved forward with it. And it’s challenging to try to take one of your favorite songs and do it justice, or make it better in some way. But I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out.
A.E.: “Yeah, it’s definitely a really good song on the album, too. Could you talk a little more about the song “Welcome to Sydney,” because it feels like it’s a great way to wrap it up, but also feel a little different, too.”
J.N.: “Yeah, thanks for asking. This song is a reference to an essay called “Welcome to Holland.” It’s an essay by Emily Perl Kingsley, and people sent me a lot of different things when Alyssa got her Down syndrome diagnosis at birth. A lot of them weren’t very helpful, but this essay did help me, and it’s about somebody who planned a trip to Italy, and they packed for Italy, and they got the guidebook for Italy, and then when they got there, somehow something got messed up and now they’re in Holland. And they’re very frustrated.
Then they start looking around Holland after they readjust and figure that Holland is also a great place to take a vacation. It’s just that you were expecting something else. To boil it down to something really simple: it’s not bad, it’s just different.
So coming to the acceptance of who my daughter was and being able to say, ‘This is just not what I expected.’ That doesn’t mean that it’s bad. So what I did is I changed Holland to Sydney because Sydney is my daughter’s middle name. And so when I sing the choruses about the great things to do in Sydney, Australia, I’m really singing basically a brochure for my daughter to tell other people that she’s really amazing.
So it’s about that. It’s about adjusting your expectations because your expectations and your happiness are really tied up in one another, to coming to a complete acceptance of my life as it is now, Alyssa, who she is, and being able to love her.
That’s really what that song is about. And it’s sort of a starting point. Starting over again. It feels like another record could just sort of start there, because in a way it’s the starting line, not the finish line.”
A.E.: “I know this has been a labor of love and a lot of work. Have you at all thought about what’s next or are you just trying to live with this?"
J.N.: “There’s a little bit of both. There’s me figuring out that making music is such a wonderful blessing, and the music business is sort of the opposite of that, and trying to reconcile those two things and be like, ‘I made something really cool. I wonder if I could just keep making records and just make a living doing it.’ My goal has been maybe I can make minimum wage, right? Make as much as I would working at Burger King, and I’m discovering that it turns out that that’s a really tall order.
So there’s some adjusting there on my part. So yes, I am figuring out what’s next and how to do this in a way that’s sustainable for me. I started this in March 2020, and it’s been a rough couple of years as it has been for everybody, and, yeah, just trying to figure out how I can do this sustainably.
But what I feel like I want to do next is my kids, and I have written like 40 songs. Just like silly, thirty-second songs that we sing all the time. Stuff that I sing to my kids before they go to sleep. Stuff that we sing while we’re running around and chasing after each other, and it seems like the longer I wait to do that, the older the kids are going to get, and the less that’s gonna make sense. So I think that’s what I want to do next.
The question is, you know, is it gonna have a budget or anything like that? Am I willing to put in the same amount of effort, or can I just do it a little bit more lo-fi and still get the results that I’m looking for. And in addition to that, a lot of people when they heard about Aorta Borealis thought, ‘Oh, does Alyssa sing on this record? Is she playing an instrument?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, no she’s the inspiration behind, but no she doesn’t sing on it.’ And there’s almost like, ‘Oh, well okay.’ (Laughs).
Some people were a little disappointed by that so I’m like, ‘Well, we have a bunch of songs and she’s getting to the point where I think she might be able to contribute.’ And I think that would be super fun so that’s something that I wanna do at some point.
I'd like to keep writing music. I like to keep telling stories. I sometimes wonder if I could help other people tell stories that I think matter without taking away their voice. I wanna give people a voice. I don’t wanna take it from them, so that’s a very delicate balance.
I don’t wanna be the white guy that says, ‘Well, here, let me take this from you.’ That’s not what I am trying to do, but I want to tell stories that matter. And however I can help people doing that I’d like to keep at it, so there’s probably gonna be a little bit of a resting period after this time. And then I’d like to see what we can do after that.
A.E.: “Could you talk about the release show on April 8th at the Parkway and what people can expect?”
J.N.: “I’m so excited about this. I haven’t played in a band for a really long time. It’s been in that 15 year range, and so I’m playing with a drummer named Chris Fleming and a cellist named Ben Osterhouse. Ben is handling bass guitar duties with an octave pedal and symphonic, sort of, string quartet kind of duties.
It’s just trying to tie everything together, and I think it’s working really well. We’re trying to represent all the things that are going on in this record as best we can as a trio, and I think it’s gonna be a really cool adaptation of this record. So people will get to experience it in a different way.
I’m playing with Ben Noble, who, I think the best comparison for him would probably be a Sigur Ros vibe. Really just a smooth full band kind of electronica. He’s brilliant. I think he’s amazing.
Then my friend Chris Mason is opening the show, and everything he does is wedding-worthy. I think he does it so smoothly. So it’s gonna be three full bands even though it’s just three guys’ names — it’s three bands. And I think it’s gonna be a really cathartic, community-driven experience. And I think people are really going to feel like they made the right choice if they come.
A.E.: “A portion of the proceeds will be going to a non-profit called Jack’s Basket. Can you talk about that organization?”
J.N.: “Jack’s Basket is an organization run by a friend of mine named Carissa Carroll, and I met her because she called shortly after Alyssa was born and said, 'Hey, I have some things I’d like to drop off for you, and can I come over?’
So she came over after the kids were in bed, and she dropped off this basket of resources for us to better understand a typical kid with Down syndrome. More than what helped me about that is she talked with us for a while and helped me to understand that I’m not the only one that has gone through this. That I’m not the only one that has these feelings.
One of the big things she told me was that a lot of doctors don’t say congratulations when a kid is born with Down syndrome, and that that’s really bothersome to people. And I was still struggling with, like, you know, ‘But she has a heart defect. When people say congratulations when your kid is really unwell, that felt wrong to me. So she just really helped me struggle through a lot of these feelings that I had.
And now her organization called Jack’s Basket has delivered thousands and thousands of these baskets to families all over the country and the world, I believe. So that they can help them celebrate their kid when they have Down syndrome. And so I’m really appreciative of that organization and I wanna be able to give back.
And as a cool thing that she wanted to do with me, there’s a little business card that says Aorta Borealis on it when you get your Jack’s Basket now. So there’s sort of a common appreciation between the two of us, which is pretty cool.
A.E.: “What do you want people to take away from the record?”
J.N.: “I want people to connect their own story to this one and know they're not alone. And musically, I want people to understand there is still value in the album as an art form; that trying to create something where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts is a worthwhile pursuit.
“But mainly, I want Alyssa and her story to be known. There's a line in “You Are’ that says about her, "You're a powerful gale wind's force, you can make anyone change course." Alyssa has a remarkable knack for brightening people's days and dispelling the way people see Down syndrome.
She is more than a diagnosis and more than her health history. I want to raise Down syndrome awareness, and I can't think of a better way than showing people who my daughter is.”
Check out Aorta Borealis where ever you stream your music and purchase tickets for the release show here.
