Tessa Rose Jackson is on the rise

Fears, identity, and inherited stories have shaped Jackson’s journey towards The Lighthouse, which began when she took her very first singing lesson in her early teens and later attended the BRIT School for Performing Arts, where she discovered a love for songwriting and production. But her breakout moment came with the release of her 2013 debut album, (Songs From) The Sandbox, a 12-track folk-pop collection that brought Jackson notable success at just nineteen years old.

Although the release led to Jackson becoming a recognised pop artist in Holland, she felt caged, resisting the idea of being known solely as a pop spectacle. In what she describes as “an act of rebellion” against performative artistry, she left her own name behind, adopting the moniker Someone. “I’d come from this place of not liking my name,” Jackson reveals. “Tessa Rose Jackson sounds sweet, flowery, and very feminine. So it was like, ‘Oh, you must make soul, or you must make sweet country music.’ So, I ran up against that quite often.”

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From 2017 onwards, Tessa Rose Jackson became Someone. Inspired by the likes of Charlotte Gainsbourg, Carole King, Feist, and Tame Impala to create an immersive, dreamlike soundscape, Jackson used her alias as a point of exploration, allowing her to create without constraint or forced labelling. “I took on the name Someone because I wanted a completely genderless name with no expectation that would allow me to develop and do whatever I want,” she explains. "It really did allow me to feel free and explore musically.

Over the past six years, Jackson has released four projects as Someone: two EPs, Orbit (2019) and Orbit II (2020), and two full-length albums, Shapeshifter (2021) and Owls (2023). Last January, however, she returned to her own name to release another EP, A Mirror Sometimes. By this point, Someone had served its purpose for Jackson, and she found that it was creating more distance between herself and her work rather than being the creative vehicle that she initially intended for it to be.

“A couple of years ago, I noticed that if I was speaking to someone and they were like, ‘Oh, I looked up your music online’, I’d always think ‘What did you look for exactly?’” she laughs, reflecting on the realisation. “Then, I realised that everything I was releasing, that I really cared about, wasn’t under my own name. It was under this really anonymous name, and I realised that it was actually quite upsetting and confusing in a way. So, I started the transition back into my own name.”

However, Jackson was not completely sheathed in anonymity across musical projects. She is credited with making music for various productions across film, television, and video games, including 2024’s Life is Strange: Double Exposure. But in returning to her name for her own work, stepping out from behind a veil, Jackson has allowed herself to delve deeper into the topic of grief, something that has permeated her life since her youth. “I was raised by two mums, and one of my mums died when I was just sixteen,” Jackson tells me. “Grief is a really interesting thing in that your relationship with the person who has died, even though that person is gone, your relationship still kind of develops.”

When Jackson speaks about death, it’s not with the demeanour of someone who is pinned down by the anxious weight of mortality and the ostensible uncertainty that comes with experiencing loss. Instead, she speaks with a curiosity and acceptance developed over years of observing how a relationship with a loved one changes after they’re gone. “She was my mom, so now, as a woman, as I continue to discover things, I’ll have a dialogue with her in my head,” Jackson says, laughing lightly, though recognising the comfort in ensuring that her mother maintains a continuous presence in her life. “It’s a little bit psychotic, maybe, but also really nice. And there are so many things I wish that I could say to her or share with her, and things that I’m figuring out about her as well. With this album, it’s been really nice to explore that.”

“I’ve seen death at quite a young age,” Jackson continues. “There are a lot of gay people in my family, so our photo albums were filled with pictures of people I’d never met because they all died during the AIDS crisis. So, death in my family has always been part of my life, and something I’ve been very interested in. I’m always curious as to why people are so reluctant to talk about it, because I think it’s fascinating, and the one thing that connects us all. I see it as a motivator.”

While Jackson may have previously found herself hindered by fears in her creative world, her knowledge of transience, or more bluntly put, “Well, I’m gonna die one day”, is what pushes her to just push past her nerves and make what feels true to her. In this instance, it’s making a work that honours her personal connection to death, allowing her to contextualise new realisations. “The Lighthouse is all of the stuff I’m figuring out now in the context of death, what it means to be transient, and how I deal with the fact that I’m going to lose people, I have lost people, and people will lose me.

For Jackson, learning how to cope with loss has largely come from observing her family, who have developed traditions around preserving the memories of their loved ones who have dealt with the enduring effects of the AIDS crisis.“We have lots of traditions around death. At Christmas, we always light a candle and honour everyone who has passed,” Jackson tells me. “And the sad thing is that every year there’s going to be a new name, whether it be by an extended family member, or the partner of a friend that you know.”

Through her own understanding, Jackson has also gotten a better grasp on how to support others dealing with the grieving process. “I think I’m good at dealing with other people that lose people, and I think that everyone who has lost someone will be better at it, because I think a lot of people retreat because they’re afraid of hurting you or saying the wrong thing,” Jackson explains. “I think that’s actually really detrimental and quite dangerous, because it can make someone feel really secluded from the world, as though they have to deal with their grief on their own, because everyone is afraid of them.”

“The best thing that I’ve learned from that is to stick around and allow the other person to lead the way,” Jackson continues. “Life does go on, life has to go on, and it’s okay to allow someone to breathe, cry, laugh, or do whatever it is without any kind of judgment or expectation.”

The Lighthouse is not quite a retrospective, but the product of Jackson unpacking new feelings and experiences in a space without judgment or expectation, as she tells me, but it wasn’t always intended to be that way. The album was initially written as a concept album about a sailor lost at sea, guided to an island by a lighthouse. “I always write everything so autobiographically, so whenever I try to write anything that’s not, it feels so contrived and wrong,” she laughs. “But I thought I’d try. So it started with the song ‘The Lighthouse’, which sparked the idea. It’s the story of a sailor lost at sea who sees a lighthouse in the mist. But then he accidentally arrives at an island, the Island of the Dead, and he has conversations with these people who teach him about life.”

“At the end, after they’ve taught him about having lived life and lost it, they’d send him back to the Land of the Living,” she details. “That’s the one song that has a concept, and it was originally meant to be the last song, because I wanted it to show that we all end up on this island, but not yet. When your time comes, it’s not now, and you end up back on the Land of the Living with a newfound courage.”

Instead, the album opens with the title track. When Jackson sings “I’ve been away / I knew her by name” and “The lighthouse sings for me / I guess this must be the place”, against a backdrop of pensive string motifs and an acoustic melody that moves like rocking waves, it channels a certainty that guides her through navigating the album’s changing emotional territory. On the dark folk tones of “The Man Who Wasn’t There”, Jackson asserts, “I’m not carrying that again”, her decisive statement backed by low vocals and sharp, bowed-string strokes. Elsewhere on the record, Jackson steps into a space of memory preservation, remembering her late mother as a flock of geese flying over Lake Superior in her home state of Minnesota on “Wild Geese”, which Jackson notes, “she always used to talk about it with so much love.”

Written partly from her home iqqn Amsterdam and from a secluded location in rural France, Jackson also pushed herself to break out of her comfort zone on The Lighthouse, straying away from her traditional songwriting process and the pop song structures that she has previously relied on, in order to fully realise the themes of the record.

“Normally, I’d just be a bedroom producer,” Jackson explains of how she approached her previous work. “I’d sit down, record it fully to the end, then have my band members re-track the parts, but better. But I didn’t want that this time. I really wanted it to feel open, to breathe, and to have them be an integral part of the arrangement as well. I really had to ignore the control freak in me, allow myself to let go a little bit and discover that if you’ve got the right people collaborating with you, you’ll make something so meaningful because you’ve got many different voices contributing to your story. It makes it so plentiful, so colourful.”

Testing the waters even further, Jackson invited one of her best friends and documentarist, Bibian Bingen, to capture her and the band during the recording sessions, offering an intimate look at their creative process. “It was great, because within the first two days, she was really meticulously filming us doing everything,” Jackson muses. “And by day three, I saw her just lying on the sofa, filming the ceiling. And I thought, fair enough, this shit is boring. But it followed the natural process of what was just going on. It became clear that it wasn’t going to be a document, a chronological account of how we recorded this album, but an exploration of how she feels about the creative process, and how she’s seen us deal with the creative process.”

As Jackson returns, now proudly bearing her own name on a full-length album for the first time in over ten years, she’s peeling back layers of herself that have only blossomed with age. “I feel like my twenties were one big ball of trying to be a hundred different versions of myself, and not really allowing myself to be me all the time,” Jackson admits. “I am in my early thirties now, and I don’t know what it is, but as a woman, I’m only just understanding myself and appreciating myself.”

“And funnily enough, it feels like it very much makes sense with this record,” she continues, acknowledging a sense of serendipity that exists between her own growth, and her ability to translate this to a musical work. “Every album is different, and I am very musically eclectic. I don’t think that’s going to change, but I do think that with this record, I’ve landed. For a while, it felt like I was circling the runway. But now I’ve landed in a way that makes me feel excited for the next record. Whatever comes next, it’s not going to sound the same, but I feel like I found a voice that really matches me, my personality, and what I like musically.”

Now that Jackson has landed, interpreting loss from a maturing lens, shedding components of her musical identity, she stands at a turning point. “I could get hit by a car tomorrow! she laughs. And while she notes that it might be a macabre perspective, her awareness of how life can be precious, though fleeting, drives her to remain authentic to herself, her art, and to remain curious, with the sole aim of leaving the world a better place than she left it. “In the end, my life doesn’t matter. And I’ve just got to try,” she notes, guided by one poignant principle: “If you’re not a little bit scared of dying, do you really appreciate what it means to be alive?”