Jessica Goyder

Bio:

..  “This, I realised, was the best thing I’d seen in three days of Glastonbury. Her name, I discovered later, was Jess Goyder...... This woman is special.”

Johnny Black, Mojo, Blender

It took Jess over a year to track down the producer Sean Hargreaves who, inspired by the strength of her songwriting, went on to bring together some of the UK's leading musicians. You can enjoy the fruits of their labour here...

Jess has had a love of music and a drive to perform since her childhood in India, Ethiopia and the UK. She classically trained as a pianist, later taught herself guitar and began composing songs during a long convalescence from a tropical illness in her teens..

Jess cut her teeth with an Oxford-based band and played her way solo around London and Sydney. Little short of a “musical explosion” followed her first landing in Barcelona after falling in with a crowd of Brazilian musicians, singing all over the city and earning her rent as a singing angel street statue for over a year. Later periods in the city were spent wrestling music theory in Catalan and taking local cabarets by storm in an eight-girl country band. Her songwriting is often inspired by her travels, from a tour of Central America and Cuba, to a series of concerts in Brazil and Argentina..

Jess has performed on stages of all shapes and sizes, from under a washing line in Brazil to small stages at six Glastonburys, Brighton and Edinburgh Festivals, City Showcase, a residency at Henley Festival and she walked onto the main stage as Jools Holland walked off at the first ever Cornbury Festival. Since returning to London and signing to the publisher Speegra, Jess continues to perform regularly all over the capital with a small band and as a duo with the cellist and singer Emma Butterworth.

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Influences:

Joni Mitchell's 'Blue' survived the heat and dust and it all started. Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, Ani DiFranco, Nick Drake, Jeff Buckley, Emmylou Harris, Billy Holiday, Cassandra Wilson for the way she creates a whole world with her production, PJ Harvey, Everything but the Girl, Beth Gibbons, Erykah Badu, Nina Simone, Duke Ellington, Stevie Wonder, Lenine, Joyce, Jobim and other Bossa Nova greats, the saudade in the voice of Milton Nacimiento, John Lennon, Immogen Heap, Joan as Police Woman, Gabrielle, Marcia Griffiths, Angelique Kido and Florence Welch for their vocal power, old Lemonheads for the melodies, Nirvana, Ojos de Brujo, check out Rossabella Gregory, an almost uncountable number of talented musicians met on the road, Debussy, Chopin, Oscar Peterson, Bernard Herrman, Yousson Dor, Low, Pablo Neruda, Oscar Gonzalez Naval, Wiliam Blake, ludicrously jaunty little folky melodies that seem to spring out of nowhere at unexpected moments, almost any train journey, walking with purpose with a rhythm in your head, the smell of sea air and warm summer winds, silence.....

Sounds Like:

Jess Goyder