"Stirringly tender and gorgeously cinematic, Darren Jessee's sophomore album is a quiet tempest in sound and sentiment alike."

— Atwood Magazine

“Persistent tranquility and piercing cleverness.”

— American Songwriter

“This sense of regeneration is central to the album’s quiet strength. A welcome reminder that it’s not how loud you are, it’s what you have to say.”

— The Arts STL

“A quiet little masterpiece thats plums the depths of small moments and fleeting acts of intimacy.”

— PopMatters

"Nice stuff."

— Brooklyn Vegan

"A haunting beauty."

— York Calling

"A gorgeous track, building on just an acoustic guitar and Jessee’s voice. Strings join, and that leads to a beautiful instrumental section that builds until a full band joins in before the close. It’s an incredible moment once everything comes together. Jessee paints a vivid picture of Cape Elizabeth, Maine — a place as beautiful as this track."

— The Revue

“Piercing heartache, respectively cutting and soothing 8/10.”

— Americana UK

"The standout track "Letting You Go" has one of the album's more haunting melodies, also punctuated by strings that never overtake Jessee's voice."

— All Music Guide

“Would that every musician and artist crafted music as intimate and heartwrenchingly honest as Darren Jessee; perhaps then, we’d have a little less violence, and a little more forgiveness, empathy, and beauty in this world.”

— Atwood Magazine

"Jessee takes his insightful songwriting chops and churns out his own taste of bold melancholy folk, making The Jane, Room 217 one of the year’s must-hear mood records."

— Glide Magazine

"Opener “Anything You Need” is one of The Jane, Room 217‘s standouts, a quiet acoustic-guitar/piano number that’s bathed in breathtaking strings by song’s end."

— Magnet Magazine

“The sobering “Plastic Bag” reignites the cathartic fire first lit in “Anything You Need” as if to bring the overarching thematic elements of The Jane, Room 217 full circle before Jessee launches into the concluding ballad “Go On Baby Break Down,” which stands as the most evocative closing track I’ve heard in the last five years bar none.”

— No Depression

"There is a distinct heartache and happiness that interact through each track, which grows deeper with each listen."

— Surviving the Golden Age

"Please, God, send us more Darren Jessee albums to cut away the bullshit of modern life – his album The Jane, Room 217 is proof this is possible."

— Music Existence

Central Bridge (2023)

Central Bridge is a real place — a small hamlet in upstate New York with a population well under 1,000. But Darren Jessee didn't have that tiny town, or any kind of physical structure, in mind when he chose Central Bridge as the title for his new album. The singer-songwriter had something far more intimate in mind.

"Central Bridge is looking for life after the pandemic, looking for connections and to be connected through the heart and not just through the mind," Jessee says. "To really feel your connection with everything, whether it's nature or other people."

The songs on this new album — his third as a solo artist — seal those bonds by highlighting the small moments in life. Those seemingly tiny details that wind up leaving lasting impressions on a person or stirring up deep seated memories. A crumpled pack of cigarettes in the pocket of an old jacket. The freshly waxed floors of a supermarket. A pile of wet swimwear on the floor. The startling blue of a cloudless sky.

With that, there’s a generosity to what Jessee has achieved within his solo work, and especially on Central Bridge. He invites listeners into his unique artistic world, building the songs with humble instrumentation and plenty of open space to allow people to follow the threads within his plainspoken, yet elegiac lyrics. The nine tracks on Central Bridge are, as always, deeply personal to Jessee, but rife with a universality that should resonate deeply within anyone willing to spend some time with the album.

Some of the more beguiling qualities of the record come from its hushed, understated nature. Jessee wrote and recorded the bulk of it in his Durham, North Carolina home — a move that allowed him to take his time putting it together and gave a comforting aura to the finished songs.

Adding to it is his vocal tone, which is far afield from his singing in Ben Folds Five, the alt-pop trio where Jessee’s talents were introduced to the world at large, and Hotel Lights, the indie rock group he fronted. On his solo work, Jessee dials his vocals down to a soothing purr that makes the ache and beauty of his lyrics that much more acute. “If you're willing to lean into it,” he says, “my voice has all these human details that I think make the music kind of special in the long run.”

The material on Central Bridge was further fleshed out at Drop Of Sun Studios with the help of Alan Weatherhead, a long time associate who helped bring Jessee’s previous two solo albums, 2018’s The Jane Room 217 and 2020’s Remover, to life. He’s responsible for the keyboard parts throughout and, by mixing the LP, the rich, textured balance of sounds from Jessee’s languid vocals to the luscious sweep of a string section.

“We have a great chemistry,” Jessee says of Weatherhead. “We both have vinyl collections and we enjoy all the little nuanced details of recordings. It’s like a band mentality, in a way, but it’s just two people. There are certain things we don’t even need to talk about anymore, and it’s really great for me just to play music.”

As a lifelong listener, Jessee understands as well as anyone the unique power of a song and an album. And he’s felt the effects when something strikes a chord within a worldwide audience after “Brick,” the song he co-wrote with Ben Folds, cracked the Top 20 in 1998 and pushed the album it’s on, Whatever and Ever Amen, to platinum sales.

Jessee knows what a rare thing that was and continues to be, but it hasn’t shifted his singular approach to songwriting one bit. He still creates music as a means to express something within himself that he’s sure will find that Central Bridge to his many fans and new listeners alike.

“I think of a ‘central bridge’ as both looking inward as well as looking at what we all have in common,” he says. “A bridge to the heart. An offering.”

REMOVER (2020)

North Carolina-based singer-songwriter Darren Jessee finds nuance and strange beauty in the messier aspects of our lives. And with Remover, his forthcoming follow up to 2018’s The Jane, Room 217, Jessee continues to redefine the significance of quiet moments filled with grand consequence. 

Best known as co-founder and drummer for Ben Folds Five, Jessee has also worked as an instrumentalist for Sharon Van Etten and Hiss Golden Messenger and released four albums as singer and songwriter for indie band Hotel Lights.

The Jane, Room 217 (2018)

For someone as soft-spoken as North Carolina-based songwriter Darren Jessee, it might come as a surprise to learn that he has a gold record (in storage somewhere), a platinum record ("I never called them to get it"), and was part of a recent Grammy win ("someone told me they would mail me a certificate if I wanted…"). For years, though, he's managed that almost impossible feat of remaining both ubiquitous and out of the spotlight at once.

Since 2006, he's released four records under the name Hotel Lights, all while working as a drummer for a series of wildly acclaimed acts. He played drums for Sharon Van Etten in support of her celebrated 2014 release Are We There, and since 2016, he's been a member of the Durham-based band Hiss Golden Messenger, performing most recently on their 2017 Merge release Hallelujah Anyhow. In 2017 he contributed to The War on Drugs' A Deeper Understanding, which won the 2017 Grammy Award for Best Rock Album. Before any of that, Jessee made his name as a member of the band Ben Folds Five, for which he co-wrote their biggest hit, "Brick."

"I always felt like I needed to have a band," Jessee says. "There's something about being with a group of people that gives you confidence. But secretly I wanted to have the courage to be a solo troubadour."

With his new record, The Jane, Room 217 – Jessee's first as a solo artist – he's finally seen that through.

In late 2016, on the heels of Hotel Lights' release Get Your Hand in My Hand and a world tour with Sharon Van Etten, 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 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.