Esperanza: Songs From Jack Kerouac's Tristessa

A leading light of the maverick pack of ‘50s writers who forged the Beat Generation, whose works sparked the cultural revolution of the ‘60s, Jack Kerouac is best known for his exhilarating lust for life, distilling his adventures and his hopes in a series of high-octane novels. While the image of Kerouac as a freewheeling spirit of the open road has endured, his novel, Tristessa reveals his obsession with the darker recesses of human experience.

The New York Times has described Kerouac’s Tristessa as "truthful, entertaining and honest...with Kerouac voyaging in Mexico City, running into a Mexican girl. Her story is heroin...descriptions of hallucination, riding around town in cabs, street surveying, people who have given up on life as we know it." In the grand scheme of the Kerouac canon, Tristessa stands between the adventures recounted in On The Road and his emotional breakdown chronicled in Big Sur.

For Reimagine Music’s Esperanza: Songs From Jack Kerouac’s Tristessa, 19 acclaimed singer-songwriters and bands create songs inspired by Jack Kerouac's bittersweet novella: William Fitzsimmons, Tim & Adam, Gregory Alan Isakov, Peter Bradley Adams, Alela Diane, Wintersleep, Marissa Nadler, Joshua James, Lee Ranaldo (of Sonic Youth), Hey Rosetta!, Will Dailey, Willy Mason, Matt Costa, The Low Anthem, Neal McCarthy with Barbara Kessler, and Tony Dekker with Hanne Hukkelberg.

Set in the seething cauldron of Mexico City in the 1950’s, a termite hill of the devotional and the damned, the novel follows Kerouac’s love affair with Tristessa, a morphine-addicted prostitute. 60 years after Kerouac’s doomed tryst, an eclectic group of artists respond to this underappreciated novella, adapting its themes to music, adopting Kerouac’s very words into lyrics. Kerouac scholars have since found Esperanza was the given name of Jack’s prostitute, Tristessa, pointing the way to the titling of this release.

"I had a sense that the darkness of Kerouac’s Tristessa could become the perfect palette for the right artists, that they might channel the bleak emotions of the novel into something vivid and intense, which I had known them to do so brilliantly in their own life and work” says album producer Jim Sampas. “But I also wanted a few songs influenced by the light Kerouac wrote of, underscoring his, Kerouac’s, urge to live within and beyond the despair he found in Mexico. Some created their pieces using the text as lyrics; others found inspiration within the subtext of the novel itself. What I hoped to achieve was a discovery, pointing folks toward this lesser known Kerouac novel while placing their finger on the pulse of the absolute best in indie rock.”

Sampas’ other Kerouac works includes Big Sur, a critically acclaimed 2013 Sundance Film Festival Official Selection starring Jean-Marc Barr, Kate Bosworth, Josh Lucas, Anthony Edwards, Radha Mitchell with a score composed by Aaron and Bryse Dessner of The National, One Fast Move documentary featuring Tom Waits, Sam Shepard, and Patti Smith, the soundtrack for that film with Jay Farrar & Benjamin Gibbard, and Kerouac--kicks joy darkness with Allen Ginsberg, Eddie Vedder, William Burroughs, Johnny Depp, Jeff Buckley, and others.