Jesse Lynn Madera
Born in Parkersburg, West Virginia, Jesse Lynn Madera’s upbringing was chronicled by music and big moves. From backyard singouts to piano bar crooning to spontaneous living room sessions with legendary Chuck Berry pianist Johnnie Johnson, rhythm was an inherited instinct — a soul-baring skill that raised her as a talented melody maker and lyricist. “I don’t remember a time without having music around,” she says. “I didn’t realize that a lot of families are not like that. I hope that feeling of a shared heartbeat comes through to anyone who hears my music, whether it’s live or through speakers. That is the goal: to synchronize.”
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Praised by American Songwriter for her “shapeshifting brilliance of Kate Bush and the confessional pop sensibilities of Tori Amos,” Madera quickly found her passion in a blue-collar small borough surrounded by a close-knit family. Parkersburg was a home where front doors were left unlocked and stories openly shared. Though she moved when she was three, Madera’s memories of her paternal grandma performing jazz standards with a comic delivery at family gatherings, her cousins singing over the piano in perfect blood harmony, and her maternal grandparents’ fireside “sing-outs” soothed her through bumpier roads ahead and served as the mesh through which future musical experiences would be filtered. The next chapter of her young life was an immersion in a genre she playfully calls “mom’s divorce music” – Linda Ronstadt, Bonnie Raitt, Dolly Parton, and Ann Wilson of Heart made the cut.
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“We moved from West Virginia to California —and I got really into pop. Debbie Gibson, Cyndi Lauper, Paula Abdul. After that, we moved to Michigan and my mom started seeing a man who loved Frank Sinatra and Andrew Lloyd Webber. We were listening to Mozart, going to the opera and watching musicals. Around that time mom also started taking me out with her to the piano bar to sing when I was 8. Other than getting up and singing for family, or the occasional talent show, I think the piano bar was really where I first started performing.” ​
Madera continued to learn from new genres as she dotted between states, culminating in a move to Houston, Texas, where she attended the famed High School for the Performing and Visual Arts as a Theatre major. “It was normal to be performing all the time. I would come home from school and there would be full-on parties going on, and Johnnie Johnson would be downstairs playing the piano all night, with names like Jimmy Vivino who came by to jam. I’d fall asleep listening to the party,” she reminisces. “My mom would go on tour with him.” Today, Madera emerges as one of Music Connection Magazine’s Hot 100 Best Unsigned Artists and holds tight to what made her a unique artist.
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Madera was accepted into NYU for acting and chose the Experimental Theatre Wing for its emphasis on creating personal work. “The decade of acting training did so much for me as a performer. I still draw on what I learned in those hours of study every time I’m on stage,” she says. It influences how I deliver the lyrics, how I write, how I sit or stand or talk between songs. Learning how to be okay with breathing on stage has been everything.” At home in her apartment, she was working on the craft of songwriting. Following her college graduation, she tried moving to Key West where she wrote her first real songs. “This was where I learned to treat it like work. I showed up at the piano in the morning and wrote until sundown,” she says. In New York City, Madera had also worked as a bartender, a cocktail waitress, and a one-woman contract department for a music booking agency. When her time in Key West came to an end, she packed up her new songs and moved back to NYC. It was then, at the urging of an older boyfriend, that she played her first full band show at The Bitter End. She took a job managing a recording studio on the Lower East Side of Manhattan called Eastside Sound, where Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson and John Zorn were clients.
“It was an important time. I wrote songs on the Steinway piano in the studio’s off-hours. This is where my song ‘Ten Miles Down’ came from. I wrote it in the dark, drinking whiskey in the live room.” Madera’s calendar booked up rapidly with shows at The Living Room, Rockwood Music Hall, CuttingRoom, and Highline Ballroom.
Now, she’s living in Los Angeles, winding roads behind her, ready to be the realest version of herself possible and share her stories. With plenty of milestones, including returning to NYC’s Bitter End for sold-out shows, selling out Nashville’s The Bluebird Cafe to touring with The Zombies, Maddie Poppe, Dan Navarro, and Mary Fahl, Madera’s ready to chase and claim what she wants next: an honest connection with her audiences.
Madera says she is eager to embrace change. “I feel less protective of my experiences now. I have so many tales to tell and I want to claim my story."
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