My favorite band on the planet is a band I don’t even understand.
I know. I am so weird. A unicorn. Trust me, that can be both a blessing and a curse.
As Allie Gehring, our producer on Full Ride, once wisely said:
“Don’t try to figure him out.”
Good advice. I would give it to myself.
But if you would like to further explore my particular brand of weirdness, let me tell you about Jesse & Joy.
They are a brother-and-sister duo from Mexico. Almost all their music is in Spanish. I listen to them constantly.
You may be asking, “Pony, do you speak Spanish?”
To which I would reply:
Yo hablo un poco.
And then I might confidently attempt something like:
Me gusta la música de Jesse & Joy mucho. ¡Su música es muy buena y muy bonita!
Is that grammatically perfect? Absolutely not.
Could I order dinner, exchange pleasantries and perhaps ask where the bathroom is? Probably.
Could I conduct a thoughtful, nuanced interview entirely in Spanish?
Let’s not ruin the fantasy.
(Video: Jesse Y Joy perform Mi Tesoro in Nashville)
I would describe myself as a medium-level beginner. I can speak a little, but you need to go slowly, keep the conversation relatively simple and absolutely not start throwing advanced verb tenses at me.
None of that matters when Jesse & Joy begin playing.
I love these two. I listen to them all the time. Ask my wife. Ask my daughter. They will confirm that I cannot get enough of their music.
And yes, most of the time, I have only a vague idea what Joy is singing about.
Honestly, it doesn’t matter.
I have always been someone who hears the feeling of a song before I process its meaning. You could ask me what a song I have heard 500 times is actually about, and there is a decent chance I will have no damn clue.
I might know every word. I just have never stopped to process what those words collectively mean.
Music does not reach me through language first. It reaches me through the sound—the voice, the melody, the emotion, the rise and fall of the performance.
There is actually some psychology behind this. Our brains do not experience music only as words carrying information. We also respond to tone, rhythm, pitch, dynamics and the emotional texture of a human voice. You can hear longing before you understand what someone is longing for. You can feel heartbreak without knowing who broke whose heart.
(Video: Jesse Y Joy perform Empinar El Codo in Nashville)
That is why you can feel the pain in a song before you understand what caused it—and why a voice can give you chills even when the words themselves are completely foreign. It is why an instrumental song can make you cry without saying a single word. And it is why Joy Huerta can absolutely destroy me emotionally while I understand roughly 20 percent of what she is saying.
Maybe less.
This is also why Jesse & Joy are perfect for me.
First of all, I love female singers. Some of my favorites over the years have included Grace Potter and Florence Welch. I love soul. I love depth. I love a woman with a powerful, moving and beautiful voice.
Most of my favorite bands and artists are fronted by women. I like some male singers too, which I guess further reinforces why I am weird as shit to many people.
But here I am.
And Joy Huerta’s voice? Holy shit.
I do not care what language she is singing in. I am obsessed with her gift. Her voice can be tender, wounded, defiant and enormous—sometimes within the same song. You do not need a translation to know that she means every note.
Jesse & Joy also have a documentary on HBO, and I loved them before I watched it.
Afterward? Forget about it.
I watched with subtitles—obviously—and learned more about the pain of their childhood and the complicated family dynamics behind the music. I saw Jesse navigating life as a young father while dealing with a controlling father of his own. I saw a wife who felt caged. I saw two siblings trying to turn pain into something beautiful.
It is as real as it gets.
(Video: Jesse Y Joy perform Dueles in Nashville)
Their story made me love them even more because it helped me understand what I had already been hearing. Even when I could not translate every lyric, I could feel that something real was happening inside the music.
The emotion was not manufactured. It was lived.
Maybe that is why their songs have always reached me so powerfully. Feeling does not require subtitles.
A little more than two weeks ago, I finally saw Jesse & Joy in concert here in Nashville.
I am reasonably certain I was the only non-fluent Spanish speaker in the building.
Maybe I wasn’t. But it sure felt that way.
At one point, Joy asked whether anyone in the audience did not speak Spanish. Naturally, I was too embarrassed to admit that I only speak a little.
Apparently, I was willing to attend an entire Spanish-language concert, by myself, sing loudly and butcher lyrics with confidence—but raising my hand was where I drew the line. LOL.
Nevertheless, I had an incredible time.
I sang along with my favorite songs. I soaked up the atmosphere. I looked around at thousands of people connecting through a language and culture that are not originally mine, yet somehow felt completely welcoming to me.
I was just so damn happy to see them live.
And how did I discover this Mexican pop duo in the first place?
Broadway, of course.
If you know me, you know I love Broadway. It is my thing.
When I was in Boston for the Army-Navy game, I saw Real Women Have Curves, which had just started its pre-Broadway run at Harvard. Joy helped write the music, and I fell in love with it—especially the song “Flying Away.”
I needed to know who was responsible for that music.
That search led me to Jesse & Joy, and once I found them, I was gone.
Completely hooked.
But I also think my love for them reflects something bigger about me.
I love the world.
I love people’s cultures. I love their stories, their countries, their languages and the different ways they experience life. If you have read what I have written about the World Cup, you know how much that matters to me.
The world fascinates me—all of it.
I do not believe something has to belong to my country, my culture or even my language for it to belong in my life.
Sometimes the fact that it comes from somewhere else makes me love it even more. It reminds me how much beauty exists beyond the small corner of the world I already understand.
So yes, my favorite band is a band I do not fully understand.
Maybe that makes me weird.
Or maybe it means I understand them in the way that matters most.
I may not always know exactly what Joy is saying.
But I always know exactly what she is feeling.