Jessye DeSilva’s newest song begins like any other salute to summer: With strums on an acoustic guitar and a rural setting pulled straight from a feel-good movie. “Scent of mint from the drink / That you’re holding in your hand / Stealing shelter in the shade / From the hum of summer air,“ sings the Boston artist (who uses she/they pronouns), projecting a peaceful Southern landscape.
But when DeSilva reaches the chorus, they rip the tablecloth out from underneath the carefree scene. “Now there’s a tire swinging from the gallows tree,” they state, the imagery curdling against DeSilva’s effervescent Americana. The picnic’s over.
“Gallows Tree,” DeSilva’s late March single, recontextualizes the South’s rolling plains with details from its not-so-distant past — not to besmirch the region’s natural beauty, but to recognize a racist history that’s often conveniently forgotten in favor of Instagram-ready photos opps and hosting opulent events. DeSilva tucks the meaning into a tale of two lovers’ rough patch, an idea she developed during a writing session with Alex Calabrese of Old Tom & The Lookouts.
“This pastoral, genteel scene of a picnicking couple soon led us down a darker path,” DeSilva tells Vanyaland, reflecting on the song’s opening lines. “I’d been thinking about those weddings that white folks like to have at old plantations, and how grim it seemed to dress up and rebrand these sites of anti-Black violence as quaint backdrops. Soon, we began to imagine that perhaps the couple in our song were sitting under an old tree with a tire swing attached to it, and this became another way in which we — society, and white folks in particular — re-dress the past we refuse to reckon with.”
The song’s dual narratives seamlessly overlap throughout the song, coalescing through lyrics like “Flip the blanket / Hide the stains / From the last time we were here.” Neither story feels like “main” point of “Gallows Tree” — instead of dissolving into a push-pull between public and personal histories, the single demonstrates how to consider multiple issues at once.
“I think that there are all sorts of ways we repress things,” she adds. “We’d started writing a song about a couple who barely talk anymore — at least not about difficult things — and we expanded that story to be an allegory for our own societal repression, and how delayed accountability feeds into generational trauma. There’s something pretty transgressive about ‘hiding’ a message about white supremacy in a song about a couple’s stale love affair, and while I know not everyone will get this on first listen, I hope it makes its point the more folks dig into the track.”
Tune in below.