Some younger sisters find fascination in their older sisters' clothes, shoes, or boyfriends. Pop/rock singer, songwriter, and guitar player Jes Perry was infatuated with her older sisters' record collections full of great '60s and early '70s pop, ro [+]Some younger sisters find fascination in their older sisters' clothes, shoes, or boyfriends. Pop/rock singer, songwriter, and guitar player Jes Perry was infatuated with her older sisters' record collections full of great '60s and early '70s pop, rock and folk albums. One weekend when Jes was 11 she snuck from her sisters' room every Beatles album she could find including Help, Hard Day's Night, Rubber Soul, and Magical Mystery Tour (Sgt. Pepper had been lent outâ?¦) and systematically memorized every cut on each album. What Jes got in that weekend, unbeknownst at the time, was a crash course in pop songwriting. Listening to those albums she found not only great melodies and lyrics but also great vocal harmonies and instrumental arrangements. Jes learned to sing every vocal part of every song and then continued to 'borrow' additional albums by other artists slowly and surely working her way thru' the entire collection always concentrating primarily on melodies, harmonies and song structures.
Fast forward through high school and college and find Jes still singing and now playing guitar, writing songs, and releasing her first CD of original songs. Clearing My Head includes 12 adult contemporary pop and rock tunes that are rooted in the sounds from her sisters' record collections -- The Beatles, CSN, Dan Fogleberg, Heart, Steely Dan, James Taylor and Stevie Wonder â?? as well as her own early influences â?? Pat Benatar, The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Neil Finn, The Pretenders, and eventually the Indigo Girls, Annie Lennox, Sheryl Crowe, and Wendy and Lisa. Jes also fills her songs with unexpected melodic twists, and her self-taught guitar style adds some daring chord and song structures. On top of everything is a voice that is both strong enough to fill a smoky rock club or soothing like a singer's in a café. Jes' voice is always pure, commercially accessible, and the seed of her growing presence as an artist.
Over the past 4 years, Jes has played shows all over Boston at venues such as the Berklee Performance Center, TT the Bear's, O'Briens, the Sky Bar, the Kendall Café, the Lynwood Cafe, Copperfields, Mount Blue, Emily's, the Kirkland Café, Dodge Street Bar and Grill, Rockafellas and Durgin Park. Throughout 2001 and 2002, she had a residency at
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