Jessica Hernandez has always been busy. She’s been singing since she was three, (her staggeringly beautiful singing voice deceives, as she’s had no formal training). She balanced her studies with singing in the choir and performing in every school musical. When she wasn’t in school, she helped her parents in the family bakery located in southwest Detroit.
A singer and multi-instrumentalist, Hernandez is self-taught on everything. She started getting serious about music after high school. She taught herself guitar, keys and, more recently, drums, while penning notebooks worth of experimental folk songs through her late teens and early 20s. With every recording I’ve learned more about what I want to do, but, then, also, what I should have done. By putting out so many weird E.P.’s by myself early on, it helped me learn what I should be doing .
Her voice is both smoky and scintillating, and her style is varied. Some songs harken to an old world cabaret only to be kicked up by a meaner, modern indie-rock, while other songs strike a candlelit lounge-pop aesthetic electrified by weird synth effects and danceable rhythms. Hernandez has been consistently expanding her sound, leading into an adventurous amalgam of blues, vocal jazz and neo-soul that ever-sharpens the chip on its shoulder with a ratcheting of rock.
But as tremendous and delicate her singing voice is, she was beginning to just consider music as merely a dream, something she would just do on the side between working at her parents’ bakery. But, when she got a call on her cell phone from the iconic jazz label Blue Note Records after they had heard her sing, that was the reassuring sign she was on to something, boosting her to take music from being a dream into more of a reality. Now that dream comes true.
The Fat Angel Sings 