Around this time two years ago, Jessye DeSilva felt a little too cozy for the holidays.
Like many musicians in 2020, the Boston singer-songwriter turned to regular livestreams to thwart the year’s signature combination of burnout and isolation. Then the holidays hit — and the entire pandemic hit even harder. By December, they felt like the walls of their apartment were closing in on them. Despite their exhaustion, DeSilva pushed back, funneling that Christmastime claustrophobia into a new song called “Solstice Hymn,” which they released today (November 30).
“I was really losing steam by the end of the year, but I wanted to do a stream on the winter solstice,” DeSilva explains to Vanyaland. “Everything felt really heavy, and dark, and there was this claustrophobic sense of being in the same apartment since March that the darkness only added to [the feeling]. I wrote ‘Solstice Hymn’ to try to negotiate those feelings and maybe bring some comfort not just to myself, but to whomever tuned into that silly little livestream. I hadn’t really touched the song since then, until a couple of months ago when I realized that it wasn’t just a song for the pandemic.”
It’s not just a song for the cold weather, either; the glow of “Solstice Hymn” beams beyond the winter. With lyrics like “know the days grow brighter from now on,” the track reveals a sweeping beacon of light for anyone stumbling around in the darkness — literally or metaphorically.
Shed some light on “Solstice Hymn” below.