Incendiary Performer & Piano Rocker Jesse Daniel Edwards: Album Release

NASHVILLE, TN - Jesse Daniel Edwards will release a new album entitled Violensia on June 23 via Cavity Search Records (Portland, OR). June 30 will be the celebratory rollout in his native Nashville at the newly rechristened Eight Room venue (formerly Douglas Corner). The album is the second under his name – a departure from his previous project, Juni Ata – signaling a new artistic chapter in Edwards’ career. The lead single “I’m So Happy (I Think I Might Cry)” is available now everywhere.

Experienced in many roles across the music industry – on tour in various capacities with Lucinda Williams, Morrissey, and Jason Isbell; under the aforementioned Americana moniker Juni Ata; and as a member of his brother L.A. Edwards’ band – JDE is pursuing a new sound and vision with Violensia. Across 10 songs of piano-based alternative indie rock, he presents a unique style and tackles real-life tragedies befalling the common person.

The lead single “I’m So Happy (I Think I Might Cry)” launches the album with theatrical flourish and bombast, heard in the rising and falling emotion of piano fingerings and confessional lyrics (“I’ve been around the world / And guess what, it’s all the same”). The song lurches forward with dual guitar solos and rock ‘n’ roll that straddles operatic, elegiac, and jubilant all within alternating verses.

Violensia responds to the challenges of these times through a lens that is personal, though not autobiographical. Its voice is a widescreen treatment of various characters caught in the grip of national traumas, the familiar shocks of the 5 o’clock news. There is suicide and murder. Drug misadventures and unplanned pregnancies. Yet none are rendered in self-pitying remorse; Edwards’ musical response is a full-on effort to grapple with all of it, delivered in the life-affirming tradition that is rock and roll.