Jesse Marchant with Gabrielle Zwi @ Songbyrd 8:30 PM, 9.9.19

JESSE MARCHANT
WITH GABRIELLE ZWI

SONGBYRD PRESENTS
UPSTAIRS, ALL AGES

 

DOORS: 8:30 PM // SHOW: 9:00 PM

 

Free ($10 Suggested Donation)
FREE RSVP

 

Songbyrd Vinyl Lounge 

Monday September 9, 2019

 

Early one morning in May of 2016, Jesse Marchant came to on a street in Bedford-Stuyvesant, entangled with himself and his bicycle, after a crash on his way to work. He had been attacked by an irate school bus driver who knocked him speeding off his bicycle into a parked car. After flying over the hood and colliding with the back of another, Marchant landed on his head and was knocked out, splayed in the middle of the road.

Things had gotten bad and it was time for a change.

He quit his part-time position working as a prep cook, a job he had taken to begin to climb his way out from under a mountain of debt, and left for the Adirondacks alone, in a last ditch effort to see if music might materialize and help him emerge from his state of affairs. Two months later the songs for Illusion of Love were written. Rising both from Marchant’s personal feelings of despair and the American social dread of 2016, there was much that came to surface quickly once he began to write, no less the fact that almost 2 years into a hiatus which had been mostly pained and self-destructive, Marchant found love, after nearly a decade of being alone.

The life of Jesse Marchant has always been somewhat angst-ridden. His father died when he was 14 and he became a loner through High School, before misguidedly attending business school, only to drop out in his last semester when a NY talent manager propositioned him to attend a summer acting school in Manhattan.

He went, and before long found himself living in LA, being sent to audition for pretty boy jock rolls in shows and movies he would never watch, let alone want to act in. He began to fight over disagreements with his agents and soon come to realize that he had been on the wrong path. All the while his lover was becoming a movie star, which served only to further highlight the shallower depth of his own convictions.

It was in that period that he first began to write songs. Soon thereafter his manager fell ill and died, his relationship with his girlfriend ended, and he found himself alone and lost in Los Angeles, with more than a few bridges burned.

The years that followed were isolationist. Marchant toured as a solo act, opening for countless bands growing his career, renting cottages in the Catskills in his downtime to write and record, sometimes subleasing an apartment in the city instead. He began to grow guarded and weary, drinking heavily and living in solitude with the emotional repercussions of his choices.

 

 

Illusion of Love marks the end of that era. It’s the sound of awakening and emergence – from crises both personal and political. Though the opening track, “All These Kids I Never Knew,” starts the record off with Marchant recalling a year of social atrocities alone at the piano “shot in the back / while running away”, leading the first-time listener to believe that he might be setting the table for a collection of lonely ruminations, the opposite holds true. It’s a farewell to isolation, ushering in an album of buoyant, triumphant anthems. “Heart of Mine,” one of the album’s lead singles, which Marchant and his band tear through with an urgency unhinged, channels the essence of Neil Young with the spirit of Jim James, relating from the soul of a troubled youth as it comes to learn defiance.

Ever the patient observer, Marchant watches on at those around him have suffered, decidedly more than he, with an openness to understand and ability to empathize that brings gravity to his lyrics. “Sister, I” is a profound, strong-willed ballad, featuring emotionally arresting string arrangements by the film composer Danny Bensi (who also arranged and performed all the strings on the album). Layers of lyrical context can be peeled away and sifted through as Marchant runs the thematic gamut from the social commentary of “I’ve Got Friends” (“nowadays you can make a show of your life / to convince yourself of its worth / what do you think of my private vacation?”) to the tender, plaintive “Burning Red” which was written for an old love but never completed (“We could drive into the night / I’d play the songs you like / And let you sleep when you get tired”). Perhaps the definitive lyric from the album comes in the final song (and its title track) when Marchant asks twice, in a flurry of swelling synths and strings, “who do you love?”. A fitting moment, for an artist who’s grappled with so many difficult choices, to ironically find the ultimate answer in the form of a question.

Gabrielle Zwi’s songs about identity, breaking barriers, and queer love bring the listener through her teen years (which are not over yet). With her signature tenor ukulele, and guitarist Levi Hebeisen alongside her, Gabrielle compliments her thoughtful lyrics with energetic and captivating music.

 

AWP 2018: Eckleburg Will Not Be Attending

 Being a good lit citizen means supporting lit pubs. Donate. Buy. I’m going to show some #AWP17 mags that you need to support…. @NoTokensJournal, @EckleburgReview, @open_letter.
Meakin Armstrong (Guernica)

 

We are so sorry to announce that Eckleburg will not be attending AWP this year. We simply don’t have the budget for it. We were really looking forward to supporting our authors and their books from a diverse number of fantastic publishers at the book fair and hope to catch up with them next year. It has been our pleasure to spread the word of their good works in 2017.

We have alerted all the authors who signed up. We did receive a few donations for the book fair and have refunded each one to those authors. We are so grateful for each and every Eckleburg contributor, their community interest and generosity and regret that we were not able to meet the costs of AWP this year. 

We encourage other literary journals to offer their contributors a similar author signing opportunity this year at their tables and booths, whether or not the contributor’s book was printed in house. It was truly wonderful to open our Eckleburg booth to so many fantastic books from a diverse array of publishers, and it was an easy way to support our contributors while also hanging out with them for a little while. It made our book fair experience exceptional, worth every penny we spent on our booth. It also brought more writers and readers into our community for which we are grateful. Spreading the love of lit and books is what it’s all about, right?

We wish you all — Eckleburg contributors, readers, fellow journals and editors — the best in your journeys to Florida. We are honored to be part of your writing community, and we will look forward to seeing you next year. We will send out announcements for our AWP Author Signings, hopefully, later this year for 2019. If you would like to help us with that, just consider subscribing below. It’s only 5 bucks a month for some really talented words by some really talented writers. And we’ll love you forever. 

All our best,

Rae

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Join Melissa Grunow, Author of Realizing River City at AWP 2018!

About Realizing River City

by Melissa Grunow
Tumbleweed Books

Purchase

"A deeply rich meditation on what it means to be a woman in a sometimes uncertain and complicated world, in relationship to men, but ultimately, and more importantly, to oneself. Melissa Grunow's REALIZING RIVER CITY raises just as many questions as it answers, circling back always, in beautiful prose and a clear, honest voice, to what it means to be alive, to love, and to be present for all of it."
—Amina Cain, author of Creature and I Go to Some Hollow

"Realizing River City is the compelling story of Melissa Grunow’s search for love with all the wrong men. It’s a story about loss, love, compassion, and finally redemption, as Grunow learns to stand on her own, embrace life’s messiness, and forge ahead full of hope for the future. I was cheering for her as I turned the final pages!"
—Kate Hopper, author of Ready for Air and Use Your Words

"Melissa Grunow has written an intimate exploration of need, desire, doubt, and survival; her memoir is remarkable for its heart-breaking honesty."
—Robert Root, author of Happenstance and Postscripts: Retrospections on Time and Places

"Empowering. Beautiful. Brave. These three words are the epitome of Melissa Grunow’s REALIZING RIVER CITY. Traversing through personal transformations, the strength that lives within her memoir stems from Grunow’s fresh writing and unrelenting honesty. She doesn’t hold back when showing us the complexities of what it means and what it looks like to become an independent woman. This is a book about liberation. This is a book about revolution. This is a book that will live in your body long after you have finished it, a book that will embolden your life, always."
–Chelsey Clammer, author of BodyHome and ​Circadian

"In her memoir REALIZING RIVER CITY, Melissa Grunow shares with honesty and clarity the often-precarious landscape of love, loss, and longing. Her book offers readers vibrant details of New Mexico and an intimate glimpse into a woman’s persistent search for acceptance and positive relationships."
—Dinty W. Moore, author of Crafting the Personal Essay

At times, life can feel like a challenging feat of survival. Whether it’s living through abusive relationships or figuring out the complexities of what it means to be a woman searching for love, REALIZING RIVER CITY is a memoir that proves how despite the troubles we may face, there is hope in the way we continually risk ourselves in search for the life we want to live. In her poetic exploration of past relationships, Melissa Grunow’s honest words do not falter in the face of so much loss. Taking the rage we all feel about grief and pain, and funneling it into truth, beauty, and ultimately redemption on each page, REALIZING RIVER CITY is about discovering how the most important relationship is the one we have with ourselves. Purchase Realizing River City.

About Melissa Grunow

Melissa Grunow is the author of Realizing River City (Tumbleweed Books, 2016) which won Second Place-Nonfiction in the 2016 Independent Author Network Book of the Year Awards and the Silver Medal Award-Memoir from the Readers' Favorites International Book Competition. Her work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, River Teeth, The Nervous Breakdown, New Plains Review, and Blue Lyra Review, among many others. Her essays have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and listed in the Best American Essays 2016 notables. She has an MFA in creative nonfiction with distinction from National University. Visit her website at melissagrunow.com or follow her on Twitter @melgrunow.