Grunge to bedroom pop: Jesse Golliher embraces change and potential as ‘Geskle’
Photo by Samuel Bendix
Jesse Golliher learned to play guitar while screaming Nirvana lyrics in the woods of rural Tennessee five years ago.
Now, he’s just finished crafting his first solo EP from a decked out bedroom studio in Massachusetts.
“I’ve slowly started to drift away from the Nirvana sound and into a more jangle pop space,” he explains.
Golliher has named his record “Rose Colored Glasses.” And he’s releasing it under the new moniker Geskle.
Tracked, these songs are about rejection and loss. Tracking, the process of creating all this has just as much been about personal and geographic duality. -- There’s the rock-and-roll Henry David Thorough persona of a boy in the woods. Then, there’s the alternative artist identity, musically painting through a keyboard in suburbia.
“The most raw my relationship with music has ever been”
A man walks through a neighborhood of Rockwood, TN. More populated than the rural area where he lived, this neighborhood was a frequent destination of Golliher during his years living in Appalachia. | Photo via Jesse Golliher
Golliher moved to Rockwood, Tennessee in sixth grade.
Having grown up in Massachusetts until that point, Golliher had to follow his family as they uprooted, finally settling in an old house in the western foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.
This new home was truly isolated from a town that remains, itself, isolated from society.
The pipes froze in the winter. To keep warm, Golliher had to tend to the flames of a wood stove.
The lights stayed on, but Golliher’s home never had WiFi.
People didn’t come by much either as the house sat secluded down a lonely road.
As a whole, Rockwood remains a rural community defined by small shacks, trailers and single-story homes. Wrought by recent crises like the Great Recession and the Opioid Crisis, there’s little economic development.
Burnt out semi-trucks fill empty lots and haphazard junkyards along Highway 27, which bisects the town.
Elsewhere, a single lane road skirts past the remains of the Rockwood Coal Mine, which killed 37 workers in two different deadly explosions in the 1920s.
There are a few bright spots. But, in general, Golliher does not have fond memories of Rockwood.
“It really threw a wrench in my life,” he said. “I went from middle class suburbs of America to a rough area of Tennessee.”
Still, he made the best of the situation. Golliher committed himself to guitar. He filled notebooks with tabs and spent hours teaching himself to play, taking breaks to cut wood before returning to work, his face lit by the glow of Sponge Bob reruns on TV.
“I just learned all the Nirvana songs at that point and I was like ‘I’m going to be the next Kurt Cobain,’” he said, laughing.
Sometimes, Golliher cranked his amplifier to its highest setting, shaking his house, the trees, and the stones glaciers left behind long before Rockwood got its name.
Other times, the still young boy just screamed lyrics over his strumming.
“None of my parents would be home; and I would be in the middle of the woods with a guitar all by myself,” he said. “You have to do something to not drive yourself crazy.”
This brief period in Golliher’s life came to an end as quickly as it began, though, with his family moving back to Shrewsbury, Massachusetts before Golliher’s freshman year of high school.
Reflecting on it all, Golliher says those days in Tennessee formed him as an artist, laying the groundwork for his new musical work.
“That was the most raw my relationship with music has ever been,” he said.
“High production, good bass, good guitar tones”
As his time in Tennessee saw Golliher fall in love with grunge and hard rock, the indie/bedroom pop artistic antipode emerged in Golliher’s music taste as he came home to New England.
He found inspiration in Vundabar, a Boston indie-rock band. Within that group, Golliher focused specifically on the melodic style of playing guitarist Brandon Hagen utilized.
“They’re a three piece so he has to fill a lot of the space,” Golliher said.
Diversifying his music interest and experience, Golliher otherwise struggled through high school. As the coronavirus hit this year, in fact, he said he was lucky his school closed as early as it did. If it hadn’t, he wondered, he might not have graduated.
Diploma in hand, though, Golliher said he immediately cast his attention towards his future, planning to move forward with a music career instead of going to college.
He connected with Aaron Garcia and the Five By Two Records family around that time and immediately saw a group willing to help him.
“Meeting Aaron was the most I’ve ever related to another musician,” he said. “We have the same track in terms of how we are approaching music.”
Since late May, Garcia and Golliher have holed up in Garcia’s bedroom producing “Rose Colored Glasses.” There, they’ve poured over the stacks of preamps, pedals and keyboards the Five By Two family has helped their resident producer gather.
“Aaron has so many skills that I don’t have,” Golliher said. “Since we have a similar mindset, he helps me navigate where I need to go. There’s no way I could do this on my own.”
Most days start around 12pm. Golliher sleeps over frequently and rises when Garcia wakes him.
“We start and we don’t stop until 8, 9 or 10 when we feel burned out,” Golliher said.
This breakneck pace has quickly helped the duo assemble the Geskle EP and ready it for release this month.
The tracks within are emotionally raw yet sonically polished, defined by muted guitars, thick basslines and soft slabs of synthesizer ambiance.
Gone are the fast paced, distorted rhythm parts Golliher first learned in Tennessee. In their place are simple chord strums at gentle tempos.
Those are moves Garcia has encouraged. And that encouragement is something Golliher has received with gratitude.
“It is the same sound that I’m going for,” he said. “The high production, good bass, good guitar tones -- I’m all for it.”
Video by Dakota Antelman
“I’m exploring the option of not having a stable backup plan”
Photo by Samuel Bendix
“Rose Colored Glasses” is not a grunge record like the ones Golliher listened to as he started his life in music. Yet Golliher still feels the influence of those original idols and the Tennessee town where he first found them.
Instead of shaping his sound, those influences are simply molding Golliher’s long term plans and creative ideology.
He wants to go on tour one day. He wants to keep playing music. And he’s ready to live frugally if that’s what it takes to make that happen.
“The struggle gave me calluses,” he said of his time in Tennessee. “...I’m prepared to go on tour and live an unconventional lifestyle, because I already have.”
Young rock fandom and brazen angst drive older production fascination and growing confidence on Golliher’s new record.
As Geskle, Jesse takes pride in that artful innovation. He wants to see where this goes.
“I’m exploring the option of not having a stable backup plan,” he says. “I just want to go full steam ahead.”
Jesse Golliher’s debut EP as Geskle, “Rose Colored Glasses,” drops soon. | Artwork by Grace Perrone