Jesse Tabish

Jesse Tabish, the frontman and creative lynchpin of Oklahoma’s Other Lives steps out on his own with Cowboy Ballads Vol 1. This glorious solo debut is as epic as it is intimate, the ten songs and four instrumentals distinguished by the same sweeping, cinematic arrangements and haunting, wistful melodies that typify the band’s catalogue, but with a rawer edge that reflects this record’s home-made origins.

As Other Lives’ fourth album For Their Love was released in March 2020 just as the pandemic began to hijack world events, Tabish and his wife Kim – the newest member of Other Lives – found themselves at home, unable to even collaborate with the rest of the band; so Cowboy Ballads Vol 1 was born. With Kim increasingly involved - “she played, sung, produced, and she’s really developed as a songwriter,” says Jesse – the couple found increasing inspiration and liberation through the limitations of their set-up.

“I wanted to create something a little more… nonchalant, for want of a better word,” says Jesse. “I was in the mood to stay home and just paint with sound: making a record as part of a band can sometimes be a battle! Instead, Kim and I dreamily imagined a record, like a soundtrack to a movie that didn’t exist, which was fun - and not to worry about if we’d written a single, or other such pressures a band can have. We were free, to explore, in this quiet space.”

Scaling back had already been Jesse’s modus operandi since eschewing the computers and electronics that shaped Other Lives’ third album Rituals, for writing on guitar and piano again, “to be more physical and primal with the music,” says Jesse. Cowboy Ballads Vol 1 doubles down on that sense of immediacy. His seemingly intuitive ability to convey the huge skies and endless horizons of Oklahoma’s prairie vistas were arguably fired up even more when, after living in Oregon for ten years, Jesse and Kim moved back to his home state in the summer of 2021, at which point Cowboy Ballads Vol 1 truly gelled.

“I never felt a deep connection to Oregon as I do Oklahoma,” says Jesse. “It’s changed so much since I left, which I’m addressing on this record. It also changed the songwriting, it brought it took it to an even more intimate place.”

Still, in this place of intimacy, Jesse had the skills to imagine a sizeable ensemble for his solo enterprise: “maybe a 14-piece band, with strings, woodwind, harmonica, bass, drums and baritone guitar.” But with no way to employ any orchestral layers, miraculously, the lush strings you hear all over Cowboy Ballads Vol.1 come from Jesse’s keyboards. “It just sounded natural the way it came out,” he says. “Then, we tweaked things in post-production to give it a crunchier, cooler feel.”

The atmospheric dimensions of Jesse’s descriptive songwriting and arranging were aided by his nearest and dearest. When he met Kim at an Other Lives show in 2016, “I couldn’t have dreamt that she’s become my closest writing partner.” Band members Jonathan Mooney plays some drums (not his primary instrument, says Jesse, “but he loves playing drums, and he’s developed a really cool, untrained style”) whilst official drummer Danny Reisch, “was pivotal to this project,” says Jesse. “He heard a bunch of the songs and said, ‘This should just be the thing, don’t re-record them…’ and then he mixed the album and shaped the songs so that they sounded more congruent together. He also wrote the bridge on ‘Bells And Whistles.”

‘Bless And Whistles’ is evidence that the album isn’t devoted to ballads; far from it, given the album’s predominant pacy dynamic, starting with the high-plains drama of the title track and the sweltering gallop of ‘Da Da’. ‘Castro’, the album’s lead single, is another uptempo cinematic adventure, rife with rumble and twang, as Jesse evokes not only the prairie but the desert world further west, in the ballpark of the legendary Italian composer Ennio Morricone. “I’ve always had an affinity for old Westerns,” says Jesse. “The album isn’t necessarily ‘western’ sounding; it’s more that, if I name something immediately, it sticks for me, so the album title stayed Cowboy Ballads.”

The album’s ballads are represented by ‘New Love’, ‘Price In Full’, ‘Rituals II’ and the instrumentals ‘Italia Nite I’ and ‘Dread Harp Blues’, simmering episodes fit for a cowboy as he rides off into the sunset – though few cowboys post the existential thoughts that Jesse does here. Holed up at home for long stretches, he had more time than usual to ponder the outside world. In ‘Da Da’, for example, he scans “the absurdity of the American dream,” whilst ‘Fantastik’ and Bells And Whistles’ come from the same place of railing against America’s shift toward fundamentalism. But there are equally personal thoughts, like ‘Castro’, inspired by a friend from high school who came out to Jesse, but not the wider world because of his religious family, “which was heartbreaking for him,” Jesse recalls. “But one summer, he visited San Francisco, and it really changed him to see such an openly gay community.

“I tend to gravitate to gloomier melodies, so I was excited to have a really up, positive song in ‘Castro’ - not that we’re post-covid, but something warm and kind, with a little bit of hope. An, ‘imagine when this shit is over,’ kind of song.”

Equally radiating warmth is New Love’, a rapturous paean to Kim, but in the context of Jesse’s first marriage. “I’m making peace with the past,” he says. “There is a sweet sadness to that, knowing I’ve found this new beautiful thing in my life.”

Like Castro, ‘Halloween Day’ pays tribute to a friend who died in a tragic accident: “He was in a band I saw when I was 18 that blew me away; they had a Fender Rhodes and saxophone, which was a whole new world from the punk music and guitars I’d been listening to, Jesse recalls. The album’s third lead track ‘Manchini’ also pays tribute, to another great Italian-American composer, Henry Mancini (Jesse’s original mis-spelling also stuck as a title), a favourite of Jesse’s grandparents who 16-year-old Jesse considered “supper-time music from the Fifties; I hated it. Only years ago, did I realise how great he was.” The track uses Mancini’s eerie ‘Experiments in Terror’ as a jumping-off point for Jesse’s own feelings of deep unease, specifically the era of Trump: “it was my way of saying, ‘fuck you’.”

‘Keep You Right’, the album’s second single and one of its most soaring peaks, addresses the nature of addiction. “Am I maintaining sobriety or am I just telling myself what I want to hear?” Jesse wonders. “For years, I’ve struggled with alcohol, and anxiety. Left with all this time during the pandemic, these questions rose up: how do I want to live, to spend my time? I’ve always felt productive because of my writing, but other parts of my life aren’t maybe as great.”

Yet Jesse has hope for the future, including the chance to play live again for the first time in over two years, though initially with just Kim, more acoustically due to logistics. He’s also already begun writing and collaborating for the next Other Lives album - and given the epithet ‘Vol I’, Jesse confirms another album of songs from this period waiting to be unfurled. Clearly, it’s been a period of great creativity, which has come to fruition in such an inspired, and inspiring form here. “Come back now, out from the wasteland,” he sings on ‘Castro’. “Where the days are long and you’ll be free.”