Jesse Sykes needed a jolt in her life in 2018, and it came unexpectedly when she received a call from Victor Krummenacher, a founder of Camper Van Beethoven and Monks of Doom.

“I was in a slump with my own music,” recalls Sykes, who with former Whiskeytown guitarist Phil Wandscher has been releasing records since 2002 under the group name Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter. “We were having trouble finishing our current record due to complicated life circumstances, and I was in the midst of caretaking my elderly mother, feeling very lost and frankly despondent. One day out of the blue, Victor Krummenacher called, asking if I’d come down to L.A. to sing ‘Morning Dew’ with him, Dave Alvin, Michael Jerome, who plays with Richard Thompson, among others, and David Immergluck from the Counting Crows.”

Sykes, a big Alvin fan who “loved his many incarnations,” met him years ago through music and became friends. The proposition “sounded like a very interesting mix of musical energy and an adventure,” Sykes tells me. “So, of course, I said ‘yes,’ and the rest is history!”

Sykes not only sang Bonnie Dobson’s “Morning Dew” but soon was a member of an Alvin-led band called the Third Mind. The group released its self-titled debut album in 2020, a psychedelic stew incorporating blues, jazz, rock and improvisation. Seven of the eight songs were reimagined cover versions, including songs by Alice Coltrane, Fred Neil and Nick Gravenites.

Follow-up album Third Mind 2 was released in 2023, and, last year, the group issued two albums, Live Mind and Right Now! This year, Spellbinder!, a four-song EP that’s a companion to Right Now!, was released. Citing a description written by the online Pacific Sun newspaper, the Third Mind hails the EP as “psychedelic improvisation meets rock pedigree.”

I mention to Sykes that her expressive, often spooky singing on Right Now! is unique and brilliant. And I ask her how she views her vocals and how they differ from her singing on the five full-length Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter albums.

She points out that 24 years have passed since the debut Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter record.

‘The way my voice realistically differs in the Third Mind is that, at the time of those earliest Jesse Sykes & the Sweet Hereafter records, I was still fairly young,” she responds. “So, the Third Mind is my ripened voice at this later stage in life — the late 50s. Voices change so much over time, and life divines different properties out of a voice when time is gatekeeping. My guess is anyone listening to an album from, say, 2002 might be startled by the change in the timbre of my voice.”

Some songs Sykes sings in the Third Mind are bluesy covers, presenting a somewhat different challenge.

“I had to be stretched outside my comfort zone,” she explains. “The Sweet Hereafter has some blues-influenced songs, but I write them — so they weren’t me trying to huff the fumes of these iconic singers from the past. It’s very intimidating singing truly great singers’ songs. Writing your own material is very different, because it’s you, and, therefore, no preconceived notions exist. It’s just you and the experience of it coming through you for the first time. But interpreting Fred Neil, Paul Butterfield, Jesse Colin Young — it’s a lot of wrangling internally to make it your own and get rid of the doubt that you’re not doing them justice.”

The approaches to recording a Sweet Hereafter album and a Third Mind album are very different.

“With the Third Mind, it’s about capturing a live performance, a snapshot of a precise moment in time,” Sykes says. “With the Sweet Hereafter, our records are much more about stepping out of time. The early albums were rather stripped down and minimalist, but, as time went on, we got more involved in studio antics. The core fundamentals are recorded live, but then, at least on the last two albums, we spent weeks overdubbing and adding multiple tracks. We have songs on Marble Son with probably 20 guitar tracks, lots of harmonies and doubled vocals. We get into trying to create worlds within worlds.”

Unlike the many cover versions on the Third Mind albums, songs on Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter records are originals.

Thus, on Sweet Hereafter records, “there might be more of an attachment to the notion of this intangible thing you are trying to capture that goes beyond the performance,” Sykes explains. “The sound of the recording is something I get obsessed with — a sound that goes beyond pure production.  It’s kind of a metaphysical thing, and I’m still convinced recording on tape is the best way to capture it, though many would disagree.”

When Sykes records the Sweet Hereafter songs with Wandscher, she knows the songs fairly well beforehand.

“With the Third Mind, the studio is the first time we play them together, so I’m flying by the seat of my pants,” she says. “We play one song, maybe three or four times — and the take is the take.”

Her favorite track on the Right Now! album is the opening song “Shake Sugaree.”

“I just love the song and the mythology of Elizabeth Cotten writing it with her grandkids,” Sykes explains. “I like how the Third Mind let it morph into a strange Eastern-tinged cacophony, completely outside of the folk song motif.”

Have any new things been learned from collaborating with the other members of the Third Mind?

“Well, it’s humbling to work with such high-caliber musicians and songwriters,” Sykes answers. “I suppose it’s helped me let go a little — not be so attached to a performance. Though it’s easier said than done, because I certainly haven’t mastered it. But I literally have to let go with the Third Mind. It’s also nice to just sing and not really have to carry the foundation as a guitar player, which I provide in the Sweet Hereafter. With the Third Mind, I just come and go throughout the set. I enjoy listening to the band play, almost as if I’m an audience member. I’m often in a state of pure awe — a trance almost. I kind of stare into the drums watching Michael Jerome play and truly get lost.”

There’s always been a mysterious quality in her voice, so I ask Sykes about it.

“Honestly, I kind of have a speech impediment — my jaw is basically locked on the right side since I was in my late teens/early 20s,” she says. “There were many times in my 20s and 30s when I could barely open my mouth to talk, let alone sing. It’s better now. Lots of yoga and lifestyle changes helped manage the stiffness and pain, but it still gives me grief.”

Sykes learned to push air without having to open her mouth very wide.

“I believe the limitation of my jaw’s ability to open wide morphed into how I sing,” she says. “It’s really apparent on our third record Like, Love, Lust and the Open Halls of the Soul, because it was really bad during that era. It culminates in what I’d describe as a kind of ‘shhh’ sound surrounding certain words.”

There’s more, though, involved in the unique sound of Sykes’ voice.

“Physical limitations aside, from a purely emotional context, I think I conjure an ancient energy,” she adds. “I’m not influenced by pop singers or modern-day singers anymore, but more so by old blues and very traditional singers — anything from baroque to Tibetan throat singing. I also have my own cache of ancient archetypes that I try to pull from faceless beings that just hover around in the ethers. I think, for some, my way of singing is a bit much. But it’s the only way I know how to pull the emotion out of myself. I have to get rid of myself and social constructs to be myself — if that makes sense?”

Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter recently released Forever, I’ve Been Being Born, so I ask her which group album she views as the gold standard.

“For me, Marble Son was probably our hill to die on,” she responds, “but now, in many ways, the new album might better reflect our internal worlds, our own personal truth and the fragility of the tumultuous journey we’ve been on together for over 25 years. I always explain it as Phil and I sharing the same heart — a huge conjoined musical heart. I guess the overall goal is to stay conjoined but not destroy each other. I don’t know, but, somehow for me, this new record reflects that closeness more than all the others.”

What’s the best album Sykes ever listened to?

“Impossible question, but, in the last 20 years, an album by a Swedish singer-songwriter named Nicolai Dunger, ‘This Cloud is Learning,’ has been a constant companion,” she says. “I think it’s a perfect record.”

Is there a single concert that was the best one Sykes attended?

“I saw Townes Van Zandt in the mid-90s, and it changed my life,” she says. “I mean this. Everything about how I approached my own music and how I looked at my life felt changed the next day — and forever onward. I was elevated.”

Sykes met Van Zandt, by chance, on a sidewalk after the show.

“It was a profound experience,” she vividly recalls. “First, he cried in my arms and then literally disappeared into the darkness while singing, ‘Take it Easy’ by the Eagles.”