This Valentine's Day, Bay Area native, Jess Sylvester of Marinero, will be releasing his new album "La La La" to the public and you won't want to miss it! Since 2016, Marinero has been an active contributor to the Bay Area music scene, where he put out his first album “Chican@” on the Death Records label. Many shows, records, and a pandemic later, Jess Sylvester relocated to Los Angeles in 2022, and has found inspiration in the city he now calls home. Marinero's albums have often explored themes of place-based belonging, nostalgia, and selfhood, but “La La La” is his first album written about placehood through an exploratory and filtered cinematic lens. I sat down with Jess to talk a bit about the album and his life in Los Angeles.

Here is what Jess Sylvester had to say.

“When I moved to LA, I recognized that I was seeing it from the perspective of someone who’s from the Bay Area...through filters of other media that I consumed, watching a lot of movies that had taken place in LA. I was really enjoying that. Drinking coffee, going outside, seeing palm trees and really feeling excited by that. Feeling like ‘Oh my God, it’s like these things that I’ve seen growing up in film’. It resonated with me as an early theme of something. And I didn’t feel like I wanted to be like 'Mr. L.A.' and write from that perspective, like I knew everything about L.A. since I’d only been there for a year. I wanted to write about it in an abstract way, and about the relationship I was finding with it.”

Each song on the album stories a different facet of Los Angeles, as if retold by memory. The album is dynamic, humorous and refreshing to listen to start to finish. Listening through the album, it is abundantly clear that "La La La" was crafted with an ongoing vision in mind and a message to listeners. Lyrics throughout the album express identity and belonging through terms of sobriety, adding another personal and valuable layer to the project. The album kicks off with a dramatic sequence of synthesizers that gently fall into Mexican folk instruments strumming in unison while angelic voices sing the following lyrics:

"Hark! Lament for this city of angels
a hymn
a prayer to get sober
a life's not over
join us in some laughter and rejoicing"

Throughout the album themes of sobriety, empowerment, and individual strength are interwoven into the already layered sonic worlds that Marinero has created. To any attentive ear, it becomes apparent that the album is not only a technically robust project, but a project with a message of hope in contrast to a rapidly changing and isolated world.

“I think the approach that I took on this record, it was like, playing around with a theme or genre of mystery, or a noir, or what I think of when I think of L.A., or the types of sounds or types of artists that have inspired me that are from a certain era of L.A. that I really appreciate…I guess music with cues and how music is used in film gave me some inspiration in terms of figuring out how to use genre to tell a little bit of a story”.

 In 2022, Jess took the leap from his home in the Bay Area to challenge himself artistically and creatively in Los Angeles, where he has found inspiration and opportunity as a musician. During this transitional period, the pandemic's affects still permeated the cultural landscape, to which Jess was curious and observant. As a whole, the album is an expression of both displacement and simultaneous joy, freedom and autonomy. It is Marinero’s second album released under Hardly Art Records and is his most ambitious album yet.

“It was jumping around technically. It was the hardest part…maybe writing it and doing something that was convincing for myself as a songwriter…I’m working with people who are living it and being it. We’re just doing salsa. That was a technical high bar that I created for myself to achieve going into this record because I knew that there were a lot of eclectic and diverse musicians within L.A. that I could probably achieve certain genres. Then it was finding the people that I could interweave between songs to get different sounds convincingly. There are a ton of different people who played on this record, so I think it was that combination of finding the right people to play on the right songs…”
“I’m really proud of some of the genres I picked. Like my mom is so stoked that I did this salsa song and she loves it.
And I think that was me as a young kid, putting my nose up to my mom’s music  and not really being able to relate with other people about it…growing up and looking down on it, on certain things, then becoming an adult and really embracing it and being like ‘this is so sick’.
I’m glad I was able to play a Mellotron doing some salsa moves, which is weird. And…I’m stoked that I’m able to combine these different genres in ways that I haven’t heard before, but I think are cool. Like hearing a harpsichord play salsa.”

Jess Sylvester's work demonstrates the importance of interdisciplinary awareness and collaboration. His approach to the album bridges the gaps between his cultural roots and his own expressive style as an artist.

“I can see how audio or sound is used in film to evoke certain things. There’s always going to be, like if this is a chord and it’s major, it’s going to give you this type of feeling…if it’s dissonant, it might be a little bit scary. If you listen to Psycho, in the shower scene you can hear how violent the violins are, more so than the actual scene itself. Because the scene is actually really safe and it’s little glimpses of things, but it’s teasing with gore and not necessarily showing you the whole picture, the music is more telling."

Jess approached film as a source of inspiration, noting the psychological power of a film’s soundtrack in effective storytelling. From film to Mayan architecture, Jess collected tools from many creative disciplines that helped him craft genre, story direction, characters and the overall narratives of this album and his most recent music videos "Taquero" and "Sea Changes", linked below.

While there is plenty more to say about the album and about Jess's work on this project, I cannot further recommend that you listen to it yourself. Pre-order Marinero's new album "La La La" coming out on February 14th 2025.

“La La La" was a highly collaborative project with special guests such as Shana Cleveland from La Luz, Chris Cohen, Eduardo Arenas from Chicano Batman and many more playing Jess's songs and contributing to the fullness of the album.

"La La La" by Marinero is officially released on February 14th, 2025 and can be found on all streaming platforms.

On February 12th, Marinero will be doing a listening party of the album on Bandcamp.

On March 8th, find Marinero playing a record release show at Permanent Records in Los Angeles, CA.

For other upcoming shows, follow @Marinero on social media for the inside scoop.

Watch Marinero's music videos "Sea Changes" and "Taquero":