GENNA & JESSE'S MUSICAL TRAVELOGUE
Creative and spiritual soulmates Genna Giocobassi and Jesse Dyen met in an unlikely place: on Craigslist. They are now part of a small but connected community of nomadic musicians to whom the question is not when will you be on tour? But rather, when will you not be on tour? The answer is: They don’t know. They have traveled across the US and Europe collecting experiences with people and places and translating them into song.
“We have a lot of songs that really take you to a specific place. And because we don’t live in one place, I think that house concert audiences often feel like it’s a bit of a travelogue: like we’re taking them on a little journey across the United States or around Europe because we’ll have songs that take place in different settings,” Genna says. Each song comes from a different place, both musically and lyrically; and they explain this through their variety of experiences as well as the freedom that comes with being 100% responsible for the business side of what they do. There is no influence from managers or booking agents, only from their lives and from the music they listen to, which varies widely.
While their recorded music is filled out and more stylized, their live sets are all played acoustically, with Genna’s thick voice curling around the sounds of Jesse’s piano or guitar. Jesse also sings, sometimes alone and other times in harmony with Genna, who is also beginning to experiment with more instruments in their shows.
Their performances are tailored towards an intimate audience, demanding attention through intrigue rather than volume. The house concert is one of their favorite formats; anyone can host a concert (at no cost), and guests are allowed to make donations. “We’ve been focusing on acoustic instruments because I think it’s the earthiness that, really, not only is really satisfying in an intimate setting, but it also seems to work better with our voices and the way our voices blend,” says Genna.
When the duo first planned to go on tour together, they expected it to be a test of their compatibility as both musicians and romantic partners. Jesse tells me, “We decided to drop what we were doing and to go on tour together; and that was when we were riding a two-person kayak in Hawaii and we were sort of dreaming this idea of, what would it be like if we just put everything aside and gave this a try for three months?” Three months turned into eight months, and when they had spent every hour of every day with each other for so long without it getting old, they decided to get married.
They’ve now been on the road together for about three years, approaching every challenge as a problem to be solved with an admirable dose of positivity. When I asked about these challenges, they didn’t bring up loneliness or lack of place, but their vehicle. Jesse explains, “There were challenges of… just keeping the machine rolling. Our first big challenge, I think, was with our vehicle. We had this 1984 Mercedes wagon that we were running on biodiesel and veggie oil and we loved not giving our money to the oil companies, but yet driving the kind of miles we were doing, a 30-year-old car just wasn’t cut out for what we were asking of it.”
Genna, who also writes extensive blogs and updates on their life and travels, has written a long list of ways that she and Jesse have learned to live well, in her post “Declaration of a Nomadic Artist (Heart Advice for the Road and Life in General).” It serves as a lifestyle manifesto in which she explains how they keep fit by finding time for yoga, playing, and planning routes around bodies of water they can swim in (inspired by advice from another nomadic couple). Genna also emphasizes taking care of her vehicle, but extends this word to include the body. “For me, my body and our car are temples. Without a reliable vehicle and good-feeling body, my experience becomes uncomfortable very quickly.” They’ve figured out ways to eat organic on the road, and they’ve hired a personal trainer.
Another problem they ran into was lack of time to create and record music. To solve this, they began to seek out people to take them in as “Artists in Residence.” They’ve been invited into homes across the country to set up shop and make music. And they asked the question anyone might: “It’s clear what we can get from that because we’ve got a roof over our heads and we get to make music and hang out with some nice people in a cool town, but what’s in it for them?” What they found, was that people loved having artists in their homes for many different reasons, most of which, according to Jesse, could be summed up as, “They just have this routine that goes month to month, week to week, and all the sudden it gets broken up a little bit and everything seems a little different.”
Routine and monotony are challenges not faced by this pair, or by their music. Experience some of their journey at 8pm on December 11th at Cyber Café West, 176 Main Street, Binghamton (cybercafewest.com).
