For ten years, she hid behind an alias. Now the Dutch-British artist is ready to be seen — with an album that speaks to the mother she lost and the woman she’s still becoming. “The Lighthouse” is grief as a love letter, loss as a doorway.
There is a particular kind of courage in returning to your own name. For years, Tessa Rose Jackson moved through the world as Someone — a shapeless presence, an artist without a face to pin expectations onto. She made music in the shadows of her own making, free from the weight of being seen. And then, something shifted. The hiding no longer served a purpose. The woman she was evolving into needed to be witnessed.
She was raised by two mothers in Amsterdam, in a harmonious co-parenting environment where difference was simply the air they breathed. There were no pressures to measure herself against, no mould quietly waiting for her to shrink into. Just love, and the freedom to be herself. It gave her something she still carries: a delay of judgment, a curiosity about the lives of others, and an instinct to listen before assuming. “I was always different,” she says, her voice soft but certain. “So I was very used to that sense of — well, there is no norm.”
One of her mothers became ill when Tessa was barely a teenager. In the years that followed, as her older sister left for university, she lived alone with her half the week — watching, caring, learning to read the silences between words. It made her unusually intuitive, attuned to what people hide beneath the surface. And then came the loss itself, arriving before she had the language to hold it. ‘When someone’s gone, they’re gone,’ she says, still quietly reckoning with the enormity. ‘You can say, okay, that’s enough now, you can come back — and that’s not going to happen. The hugeness of that.’
At nineteen, she released her first album. It did well — too well, perhaps, for someone still discovering who she was. Holland is a small country, and suddenly, there were definitions attached to her. Folk-pop. Happy-clappy. A young woman in a dress, dollified for consumption. ‘As soon as I feel confined,’ she says, ‘I don’t feel like me.’ She wanted to stretch, to explore the experimental and the strange, but the industry had already decided what Tessa Rose Jackson was allowed to be. Her birth name became a cage — oh, flowery, okay, so it must be sweet. Success, she learned, can be its own kind of trap. Anonymity became her escape.
Someone was not a persona, exactly — more a clearing of the air. Without history, without weight, without edges for the world to project onto. For nearly seven years, she made music under that quiet alias, releasing records that drifted between dream pop and the experimental territories she had always longed to explore. It was boundless freedom. ‘Someone was a kind of Mary Poppins,’ she says, smiling. ‘She did her job.’
Yet Mary Poppins always leaves. And eventually, hiding began to cost more than it gave. At industry events, people would search for her work and find nothing tied to her. The music she cared most about — the albums she had poured herself into — existed in a space she could not claim. ‘People can’t find the stuff I really, really care about,’ she says. ‘It’s not connected to me.’ So she began the slow walk back. First, an EP as herself, then the album that would change everything.
The Lighthouse was written in rural France, beside a graveyard, in deliberate solitude. She let go of perfection. She stopped reworking every note until it gleamed. What emerged was an unguarded creation, rawer, more fragile — and finally, unmistakably hers. ‘I’ve kind of been circling a runway,’ she says. ‘This album, I’ve landed.’ And what surfaced was not just music — but memory, finally given a voice.
Two songs on the album speak directly to the mother she lost. Not about her — to her. ‘Wild Geese’ and ‘Gently Now’ are letters sent into the silence, and when Tessa performs them live, something shifts in the air. ‘It genuinely feels like I’m putting her in the room,’ she says. ‘A weird sort of séance situation.’ It leaves her undone — but in the way that healing sometimes does.
Grief, she has learned, is not a door that closes. It is love with nowhere left to go. She knows how fragile life can be — and holds her living mum all the closer for it. And so she sings to the mother she lost, the relationship growing even now, even in absence. She speaks of her often — with her sister, with her living mum — and is eager to share this music with them both. ‘It’s a celebration of love,’ she says softly. ‘Because that’s what loss really is — realising how much you love someone.’
I’m not the woman I thought I’d have to be by now. It is a line which resonates like a confession — one that women everywhere have torn themselves apart over in quiet moments, feeling emotionally exiled for making different choices. When asked about it, Tessa pauses. She is in her early thirties. Many of her friends are having children. She is not sure she wants the same, and for a long time, she judged herself for it. ‘I should be feeling things now,’ she says. ‘By this time I should want this.’
She wonders if she is some kind of Peter Pan, refusing to grow up. But slowly, she is making peace with her own identity. ‘I don’t think I have to,’ she shares. ‘I think it’s fine. I think I’m already doing it.’
She speaks of the women who showed her another way. Leslie Feist. Patti Smith. Laurie Anderson. Artists who held space for contradiction, who proved that womanhood is not a single path. While watching Feist perform, something unlocked inside of her: ‘I see every colour of womanhood,’ she says. ‘I see a young girl, I see a mother, I see a grandmother, I see your best friend who always goes too hard at parties. I see them all.’
She wants to be every shade. She does not want to pick. And now, she knows she doesn’t have to.
Tessa Rose Jackson. Luminous. Beautiful. Herself.
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