Jessica Risker/Photo: Rachel Winslow
Jessica Risker is a musician, therapist, mother and “RHOJP (Real Housewife of Jefferson Park).” Or so she sings in one of the ten beautiful, thoughtful, sometimes political, sometimes humorous (sometimes both) songs on her first new album in seven years, “Calendar Year” (Island House Recordings).
Risker, who recorded under the name Deadbeat from 2011 until her 2018 album, “I See You Among The Stars” (Western Vinyl), is not a music therapist, but she is a therapist (and a musician) whose clientele includes musicians. Risker has also recorded a podcast called “Music Therapy” (currently on hiatus), but again, she is not technically a music therapist; she is just a therapist. The talking kind.
“I’ve always just wanted to make albums and write songs,” she says, “in addition to listening to music and seeing music—that’s really the engagement that I wanted to have with it.” Separately, she was also drawn to be a therapist, because, as she puts it, “I really like engaging with all the clinical theory, and the face-to-face conversations, and the relationships… it really is an honor to get to know these very intimate details of people’s lives and that they trust me with this vulnerability. I really like that. Certainly music therapy is very helpful and there’s space for it,” she continues, “but these two tracks just feel like my preferred versions of both therapy and music.”
Where those two tracks may overlap, Risker says, is her enjoyment in working with clients who are artists, because she relates to their “creative journey, both the process of creating but also integrating your art practice into your life… and the conflict that comes with that and the challenges that come with that.” As a musician herself, she says, “I’ve spent a lot of time feeling and thinking about that, and I enjoy working with people as they’re working through some of those thoughts and feelings too.”
Her practice is one of over 1,400 approved providers included in the network of Backline, an organization she points to as a “great resource” for musicians who need mental health assistance. Backline is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that connects music industry professionals and their families with mental health and wellness resources. While the average waitlist time for a professional is three or more months, Backline boasts of helping clients find providers within three to seven business days (of course, those with immediate needs or in crisis should call 988).
Risker says she generally doesn’t write songs in a “storytelling kind of way,” and she never sets out to write a song that “mirrors” either one of her patients or someone she’s met. And while she’s “not disputing reality,” she does support the hypothesis that reality is shaped by what’s in our minds.
She also says, “I’m drawn to psychology and philosophy, and I love thinking about why we behave the way we do with our thoughts… How our thoughts shape our experience of reality, and watching that in a personal way, as well as in more of a broader scale, social group way—that certainly is reflected in songs that may be thinking to, or speaking to, those things, as well as my own [experiences]. A lot of therapists get into the field because they can relate to some of the things they’re helping people with. So it’s also a way for me to process my own mental health and things I’ve gone through with that.”
Jessica Risker/Photo: Rachel Winslow
Part of Risker’s process for handling the isolation of the 2020 pandemic was establishing the goal of writing one new song per month; her attempt, as she has described it, to “try to feel a little sun on your face, try to make the best of it.” At the same time, she takes pains to not call it a “pandemic album,” but a record that was written during the pandemic. In other words, “Calendar Year” is not “about the pandemic,” it just happens to have been written during that timeframe.
“It’s kind of both,” as the album title suggests. She continues, “It’s kind of the expansion into ‘this was a year in a life’ and this is what this particular year happened to look like. There was a lot going on both with the pandemic and politically, which was… a very wild and different year, but there was also a lot going on personally with being a new mom and being a therapist, and just dealing with all of our personal relationships with all the change and pivoting and compromises and sacrifices and loss and all that… So I guess, it’s kind of a ‘zoom in,’ but it’s also a ‘zoom out’; like this was a ‘slice of a year.’ … I think ‘a year in a life’ kind of captures it. Here’s a little snapshot. There’s a little slice.”
Specifically, Risker references the song “Sipping in the Sunshine” as “very much a song about taking walks and trying to get a little fresh air and meditating on what everyone was going through. So that one feels pretty tethered to it all. I also think there’s some cryptic political themes to the album too.”
She points to what she hesitantly calls social commentary on the track “RHOJP (Real Housewife of Jefferson Park),” which feels “not exactly tethered to the pandemic, but in this era where it’s just hyper comparative, [and] leaning into that too.” Expanding on the concept, Risker says, “You’ve got these [‘Real Housewives’] shows and they’re so easy to watch and in some ways they’re so satisfying to watch, but also, you’re sitting there watching them and it brings up these mixed emotions in us where it’s like, ‘They look so silly,’ or ‘Look at these ladies having fights and drinking too much or whatever, but I’m also enjoying it.’ Or maybe I’m envying a certain aspect of the lifestyle. It feels sort of aspirational. I don’t know. So it’s just like, I think this conflict does feel important, and why is this so appealing? But also, you get to feel a little bit superior when you’re watching it, you know, you get to feel a little ‘above it’ in a way, but you’re also involved with it.” Risker concludes, “RHOJP” is “engaging with the conflict that it brings up for me. And then of course, me being a mom, here in Jefferson Park, this is my ‘Real Housewife’ life”—she points to that being the real “tongue-in-cheek portion of the song.”
There are parts of recording albums like “Calendar Year” that Jessica Risker loves, and other parts she thought she would love more when she first set out to make albums. “I enjoy singing—I always think it’s fun to record the vocals for an album. I enjoyed that part a lot.” What she doesn’t enjoy is feeling the frustration when an idea isn’t fully formed. “Maybe it’s less about the actual feeling and more that it feels like it hangs over me until it feels resolved, and so it is very distracting to the rest of my life. That’s the part I don’t like.”
When asked if the depiction of “Calendar Year” as more collaborative than her 2018 recorded debut as Jessica Risker is an accurate assessment, she agrees and expounds, “When I first started wanting to do albums, I was excited about all of the parts of the instrumentation, but I really quickly learned that it’s so much better when you let people who are really great at their instruments fill in the blanks… I do enjoy creating the skeleton, and I think that the outcome is so much better when you get a whole bunch of people on the coloring page at one time.”
Risker’s bandmates are described as essential to her new music and its psych-folk sound, including Joshua Wentz on synths and electronic effects (a key collaborator), Brian Weza on bass and Steve Plock on drums. “Calendar Year” features additional collaborators to flesh out her songwriting and the lush production. Her single, “4am,” features Sam Cantor (Minor Moon) on electric guitar and Maria Jacobson (Fran) on background vocals (she also contributes flute on several songs, to lovely effect), and the single “He’s Gone” features Finom’s Macie Stewart on strings.
While she doesn’t necessarily collaborate with her husband, David Yontz—they met at an open mic—they do bounce ideas off each other and share feedback. Yontz is a music director at Second City. “He’s much sillier,” she says, comparing their musical approaches.
Their six-year-old son has already released “something like” twenty-plus albums under the name Loren Huck Yontz. The discography of Huck—they call him by his middle name—is available for streaming on Spotify; what his deconstructionist approach lacks in classical training, he more than makes up for in enthusiasm, and some inherent silliness as well.
Risker says that she thinks part of Huck’s musical productivity was “inspired by watching me make albums and connecting with that, but he also just likes music. That’s been a delight, to see him engage.” He was even involved in the making of the album art. “I like watching him create because, as far as I can see, he doesn’t seem to have that inner critic.” If Huck has an idea, he goes with it. “He’s really interested in this whole process of creating the album and putting it out—he tracks my stats on Spotify. The other day he told me that Grover has more listeners than I do.”
“When I would come home from a mixing session while we were recording,” Risker recounts, “I’d get home a little later than his bedtime, but he always wanted to stay up because he always wanted to listen to the mixes… So, my particular child has been a joy in terms of music, because he’s really connected with it. I don’t know where it will go for him, but it has felt like something really kind of fun and special to share and watch him develop [on] his own.
“I think it’s cool watching a grown-up make an album and to me, when I was little, that all felt very distant and opaque; it was just people on the radio. Now I think it’s a little bit more doable for everybody to create things, so [Huck] getting to see how real and possible it is to make something like this—I love that he’s so exposed to that as well. I feel like our job as parents is: We see him have an interest, and so we try to provide encouragement, and maybe some tools, and he could take it where it goes, but we’ll see. We’ll see what happens. That’s kind of fun to watch.”
Jessica Risker performs with V.V. Lightbody on Friday, September 5 at Constellation, 3111 North Western. Doors at 8pm; show at 8:30pm. Tickets are $15 plus fees, available at constellation-chicago.com.
