JUST JESSIE!

Jessie Lee Montague is a singer, songwriter and guitarist originally hailing from Albuquerque NM, and currently residing in New York’s Hudson Valley.

After moving East as a teenager Jessie got involved with acting in NYC and spent her last year in Highschool at The Professional Children’s School. She originally planned on attending Julliard’s acting program but an unexpected detour took her to Madison, Wisconsin to embark on a more traditional college career. She continued her acting studies at the University of Wisconsin and at a vibrant local community theater called The Ark. The Ark was a bastion of creativity and was the original stomping ground for Joan Cusack, Chris Farley, Brian Stack (Conan O’Brien) and Todd Hanson (The Onion). Here, Jessie developed her skills in improv comedy and performance and was lucky enough to work directly with Chris, Brian and Todd in the ARK’s improv comedy group The Animal Crackers, under the direction of Ark owners Dennis Kern and Sara Elaine Eldridge. It was at this time that she began playing guitar and writing original music.

Jessie’s obsession with guitar and songwriting grew exponentially and she practiced for hours a day eventually leaving school so that she could devote more time to playing. She travelled with a friend to Europe and lived for a year busking on the streets and in the tubes (subways) in London as she made a living playing her original songs. Upon returning from Europe she formed a rock trio and started gigging in clubs all over Madison. Jessie and her band garnered attention right away and after their first gig the band was asked to be the opening act for Nils Lofgren. A year or so later she was the supporting act for Luka Bloom. Luka was very impressed with Jessie’s talent and he encouraged her to move back to NYC and go for her dreams full tilt.

She heeded Luka’s advice and she and her drummer Steve Jagoda headed back to NYC. The duo hit the ground running… playing anywhere and everywhere honing their sound and their live show. Regular favorite venues included CBGB’s Gallery, The Mercury Lounge, The Knitting Factory, The Wetlands, Café’ Sine, Arlene Grocery and The Livingroom. They eventually added bass player Johnny (Raggs) Ragusa to the line up and Jessie’s band JAKE was born. It was an incredibly fertile time on the Lower East Side for music and she was on the scene regularly sharing stages with Medeski, Martin and Wood, Lisa Loeb, David Poe, Soul Coughing, Rasputina, Jesse Harris and many more incredible artists.  

It was at this time that her songs and original approach to the guitar caught the ears of the late great Chris Whitley.  Chris saw something special in Jessie, he encouraged her originality and pressed her to start playing the electric guitar. He would lend her his guitars, always nudging her in this direction, and she was honored beyond measure to be asked to be his opening act for several shows, and to sing background vocals on his album Terra Incognita.

During this exciting time in Jessie’s early career, JAKE made demos at A & M records in Los Angeles, but ended up signing a deal with NYC Indie Label Blackbird Records (distributed by Elektra), and they recorded their debut album HOOKED at the Infamous Bearsville Studios near Woodstock NY.  

Over the years the band’s lineup shifted around quite a bit mirroring the larger shift of the music industry which was beginning to quake as the Major Label System that had ruled for decades was beginning to collapse. Blackbird records was a casualty of this seismic shift but ever driven and incredibly prolific Jessie wrote, recorded and self-released 3 more albums: Bloodblue, Snake Road, and Bridge.

After non-stop music making and touring for 20 years she decided to take a break from music, start a family and open a small yoga studio in Rhinebeck, New York. It was a much needed pause but it went on significantly longer than expected, Jessie hardly picked up the guitar for nearly 15 years. 

Fast forward to 2019, Jessie had re-united with a previous JAKE line-up:  Bassist Desiree Williams (Richie Scarlett, Big Sister, Ivory Rose) and drummer Nicholas Parker (Robbie Dupree, Hollomen) The trio connected immediately and started re-imagining some of JAKE’s songs. They recorded a demo for the purpose of landing some live shows and had just started mixing the songs when Covid 19 arrived upon our shores.

All the best laid plans came to a halt, the band dissolved and Jessie got to work putting together a home studio, and decided to finish the recording on her own. Through a mutual friend, She connected with the Grammy winning producer Malcolm Burn (Bob Dylan, John Mellencamp, Rachel Yamagata), he was enthusiastic to help her finalize a few of the mixes and her album UNHOOKED was born and released under her own name in November 2021.

On Unhooked, her first collection of new music in more than a decade, the New York based singer-songwriter and guitarist Jessie Lee Montague delivers music that is rich in sonic and emotional contrasts.

Over seven tracks, Montague’s ripped fiery voice and deeply physical lead guitar dance over her own electronic arrangements and elegant grooves courtesy of bassist Desiree Williams and drummer Nick Parker. The personal, polemic, and spiritual mingle freely in her impassioned lyrics.

In its earth-meets-ether drama and friction, Unhooked evokes early Daniel Lanois productions and other touchstones of the progressive singer-songwriter scene of the ‘80s and ‘90s, when traditional song and experimental sound interacted in new ways.Which is exactly the milieu from which Jessie Lee Montague comes.

On one of the more driving tracks, “Miracle,” the song slides in with an ethereal ambiance and percolating mallet arpeggio reminiscent of ‘80s Peter Gabriel, but the bluesy grit enters soon enough with Montague’s wrenched vocals; her spare, articulate guitar fills; and an approach to vocal harmonies that borders on demonic.

Burn mixed the luminous jangle-pop song “Cowboy” and the weighty art-ballad “Heaven,” two of Unhooked most striking tracks. As a writer Montague’s songs emphasize the indivisibility of love and politics, our individual journeys and our time in history.

The funky and dark “Trouble” is buoyed by a ferocious yet subtle performance by Parker and Williams and by Montague’s own radical sound manipulations.

“My songs have elements of personal relationship mining,” she says, “but they’re also about our relationship to the earth and include more global and political elements, because it’s ultimately all connected.”

All her performances and compositions share a passion and emotional urgency. “I’m a visceral songwriter, not a cerebral one. If I’m deeply moved to write something, I try to get out of my own way as much as possible. It doesn’t have to make linear sense or tell a story; it’s more sensual, and can be abstract at times, capturing a mood or a raw emotion with sounds and language.”

While Montague’s musical and production dialect was formed in the alt-decade of the ‘90s, when daring women writers came to fore in numbers, her stylistic bedrock and her guitar influences come from the renaissance of the 1970s, a fact acknowledged in her inclusion of two covers: A nervy, groove driven reworking of the 10cc classic “I’m Not In Love” and Shuggie Otis’s oft-covered psychedelic funk gem “Strawberry Letter 23.”"I always have had a fondness for 1970’s era, music, fashion, sensibility…these two songs really capture that era I think, but I wanted to update them with a more current sound.”

Currently Jessie is in pre-production for her next album, which Burn will produce and is developing her series The Bunker Sessions a virtual variety show that will feature music and comedy…the two things that help her stay sane, in an insane world.