Multi-disciplinary artist and songwriter Jesse Jo Stark announces that on November 6, she will be releasing her new album MUSE, a raw and deeply intimate body of work that finds Stark settling into her heart and emerging with some of her most honest songwriting to date.
Alongside the announcement, Stark shares the album’s first single, ‘Colorado,’ accompanied by its official video.
Written during three snow-covered weeks in Aspen, Colorado, MUSE was created alongside close friends and collaborators in an environment that gave Stark the space to write without knowing where she was going. Removed from the noise and surrounded by the stillness of the mountains, she found herself accessing a new kind of emotional clarity.
The resulting record introduces a familiar sonic language for Stark, quite like some of Stark’s earlier releases. While the darkness and cinematic instinct that have long defined her work remain, MUSE strips things back and opens them up. The production is rawer and more spacious, the vocals more exposed, and the songwriting more direct, bringing elements of melancholic Americana, bruised rock and unvarnished singer-songwriter intimacy into her world.
Her new single ‘Colorado’ serves as the first vulnerable introduction to that evolution, setting the emotional tone for the album to come. The song carries the same purity and openness as its landscape. Simple, melancholic guitars sit beneath a dry, intimate vocal, while the production remains deliberately minimal, leaving much of Stark’s original vocal untouched.
Stark describes Colorado as “the womb of the mountains”, both a physical place and a feeling that ultimately became the foundation for MUSE.
There is an unguarded intimacy to ‘Colorado,’ its restraint allowing every fracture in Stark’s voice and every detail of the songwriting to remain exposed. The accompanying video extends that world visually, capturing the sense of isolation, romance, stillness and emotional suspension that runs through the song and the wider album.
Across MUSE, Stark embraces a kind of daring emotional free fall, something she credits to the freedom she found while creating the record in Colorado. Allowing her femininity to lead.
MUSE:
- beautiful goodbye
- chaos
- colorado
- the raven
- she is a flower
- hollywoods afraid of love
- muse
- sugar crash
- when I knew I should go
- loves not dead
- rip
- age of being honest
- sundays call
