Chicago-based singer-songwriter, visual artist, and psychotherapist Jessica Risker has always blurred the personal and the cosmic in her music. In 2018, she released I See You Among the Stars, a dreamy folk record that traded in stark intimacy.
Seven years later, she returns with Calendar Year via Island House Recordings, an album that expands her sound into lush, psychedelic textures while retaining the searching vulnerability that defines her work.
The record began in early 2020, when Risker joined an informal monthly songwriting group organized by her friend Shelby Turner. Each session brought a new song, shared and discussed among peers. For Risker, this structure became a creative anchor during the pandemic. By year’s end, she had enough demos to form the backbone of a full album.
The experience of motherhood threads quietly through Calendar Year, not as a sentimental tribute but as lived reality: the balance of care and creation, the necessity of structure, the fleeting moments where reflection finds space. The album’s title gestures to time’s cycles and the rituals that shape our lives.
Risker fleshed out her recordings with a circle of Chicago musicians: Joshua Wentz on synths and electronics, Brian Weza on bass, Steve Plock on drums, and Maria Jacobson on flute. Sam Cantor and Macie Stewart also performed on the album.
Engineer Dave Vettraino, who also recorded Stars, captures the group’s interplay, letting songs drift between fragile folk roots and kaleidoscopic swells. But where Stars favored sparseness, Calendar Year is more layered and transportive, weaving melancholy, wonder, joy, and cosmic drift into a seamless whole.
The record feels as if it’s been lifted from another era, steeped in the lineage of folk’s great women yet unmistakably Risker’s own. On “4am,” her voice rides over arrangements that glow with warmth, every note carrying a quiet divinity.
“He’s Gone” stands out as well, with Risker confessing, “There’s an evil side to me,” against a backdrop of beautiful sounds. It’s a striking lyric, the kind of admission you’d expect from someone who spends her life parsing human complexity as a psychotherapist. Risker doesn’t let us off easy: the song reminds us that we are all capable of both tenderness and darkness.
At over five minutes, “City Hours” is the album’s longest piece, and its brisker tempo creates a dreamscape that is cinematic, rushing forward yet suspended in haze. “Camera Obscura,” another highlight, leans into the baroque English folk tradition that pervades the record, its intricate textures recalling that lineage while still sounding fresh and immediate.
Overall, Calendar Year is a luminous collection of gentle folk bathed in cosmic tones. Fans of Nick Drake, Pentangle, or Fairport Convention will find plenty to love. This is music that invites you to carry it with you on quiet morning walks in the summer sun, or later, as the air cools and autumn settles in, when you need a reminder of beauty’s persistence in everyday life.
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