Dutch/British composer Someone, aka Tessa Rose Jackson, on her way to Cambridge
Someone is the stage name of Dutch/British composer, producer and visual artist Tessa Rose Jackson – and her music video for I Guess I’m Changing was recently selected for the Tribeca Film Festival in New York.
The video, made by Tessa alongside up-and-coming Hollywood director David Spearing and his team, was screened three times as part of the festival’s ‘Shorts’ programme in June.
It depicts an android working in a postal factory and was inspired by the works of Stanley Kubrick, as well as drawing heavily from Apple TV’s Severance and Netflix’s Maniac series in its futuristic minimalist aesthetic and exploration of the human condition.
“It’s been wild actually, it’s been really, really nice,” says Tessa of her recent success, “to have some lovely radio play, and the music video that I made got into Tribeca Film Festival, which is mental!
“That was completely unexpected and rather wonderful.”
The Tribeca Film Festival recognition follows I Guess I’m Changing receiving an honourable mention as a semi-finalist entry at the Benelux Film Festival, with the creative duo of Jackson and Spearing having previously won an LA Film Award for Best New Music for their Shapeshifter video in 2021.
I Guess I’m Changing is taken from Someone’s current album, Owls, which began life as a screenplay inspired by a road trip around America’s forgotten towns and the surrealist shadow worlds of director David Lynch, before morphing into a record displaying the artist’s psych-pop sound and 90s and 00s trip-hop influences.
“The director for the video, David Spearing, he’s kind of like me – we call ourselves professional dreamers, and that translates into anything really,” says Tessa, who was raised in Amsterdam by English parents (“I was brought up in a weird little bubble of BBC and PG Tips”).
“It’s quite a nice label to stick on yourself, because it means that you can make a story and then it can be music that comes out, or it can be art or it can be a video, or a short film – and for me, music is usually my outlet.
“But I’m very visual and I’m also a film composer, which kind of feeds into that.
“I don’t have synesthesia but I do have a very visual way of interpreting or experiencing music – so for me the visual side just comes quite naturally and it’s just such a fun extra thing to do.”
Tessa notes that she started making music at a young age. “I think I was 14 when I had my first singing lesson,” she recalls, “and I was like, ‘Oh, this is what I want to do’.
“I’m silly sometimes but I’m also quite a serious person and I just kind of knew, ‘OK, music’. Then I got into the BRIT School, which is a performing arts college in London.
“It was a big starting point for me because I actually came in thinking I was going to be a jazz singer.”
Tessa then found herself becoming more drawn to the recording and production side of things.
“Around that time I started writing my own songs, with my boyfriend at the time – we had an acoustic duo together,” she says, “and it all changed then and I was like, ‘No, I don’t want to sing other people’s songs, I want to do my own thing’.
“I like recording and I like the tech side of it, and I think it ties into the professional dreamer’s thing that I mentioned: when you’re producing you can also completely create a sonic world as well for your song to live in – it’s not just about the song, it’s about how it sounds and the context and everything around it.”
See Tessa do her thing when she comes to The Six Six Bar in Cambridge on Friday, October 27. For more information, visit thesixsixbars.com. For more on Someone, go to the website at someoneswebsite.com.