The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2022 Spring Music Grant to Elysse to help complete her debut album, “Rest of Our Lives,” which she plans to release in early 2023.

Elysse is a Brooklyn-based vocalist, composer, and producer who crafts cinematic, genre-bending music. 

The daughter of jazz saxophonist Don Hanson, Elysse (born Joy Hanson) was raised in Laurelton, Queens on the sounds of Antonio Carlos Jobim, Sarah Vaughan, Burt Bacharach, and Stevie Wonder. She discovered her passion for singing at an early age and took her first vocal lessons at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music with her father’s colleague and collaborator, the late Tulivu Donna Cumberbatch.

Homeschooled along with her two siblings by her mother Julia Hanson, a former NYC public school teacher, Joy displayed an early passion for scholarship and graduated from Princeton University at age 19 (’09) with a degree in English Literature.

While pursuing an MA in Aesthetics and Cultural Criticism at NYU, Joy discovered her penchant for songwriting, taking cues from her varied influences to gradually cultivate a panoramic, yet intimate style anchored in her passion for classic art and literature. 

After graduating, she held editorial and managerial positions in publishing and marketing, all the while moonlighting as a vocalist within various tendrils of NYC’s music scene, from Psychedelic Salsa (La Mecanica Popular) to folk-pop (Hudson Mueller). She has played some of NYC’s most cherished stages including Celebrate Brooklyn, The Brooklyn Museum, National Sawdust, Minton’s, Soho House, Joe’s Pub, Smalls, Webster Hall, and Blue Note, while hosting a monthly Jazz Salon at Soho Ludlow House for three years right up until the pandemic. 

Along the way, Joy continued to develop her passion for composing, producing, and performing at a modest but persistent pace under her solo project Elysse, releasing a single as well as an EP entitled The Preludes in 2021. As Elysse, she has shared stages with Adi Oasis, James Tillman, and L’Rain, and her voice can be found on tracks alongside ZENG, Braxton Cook, Marquis Hill, Cartoons, and others.

Since making the decision to pursue music full-time at the start of 2022, Elysse has focused her efforts on the next milestone in her career as an artist: completing her debut album, “Rest Of Our Lives,” which she plans to release in early 2023.

Rest of Our Lives is the culmination of her lifelong explorations as a vocalist, writer, poet, composer, and producer. The songs on this album pursue her guiding artistic principle: that a song is its own universe. While the tracks on Rest Of Our Lives draw from an array of musical idioms, they all express her primary aim as a writer and a poet: to capture the multidimensionality of a feeling and provide a sonic space for listeners to discover fresh modes of thinking, feeling, and imagining. 

Her stated production goal is a state of deep sonic and emotional immersion she terms “Audio VR.” As the album’s primary, composer, performer, and producer, Elysse directs each aspect of these tracks’ world-building: from developing a song’s narrator, to dialing in synth sounds, to carefully creating a 3D experience of the arrangement in the mix. Her collaborators on the project, among them Carlos Hernandez, Brandon ‘Buz’ Donald, Paul Wilson, and Arun Pandian, share her passion for poetic depth, emotional fidelity, and nuance.

Each song on Rest Of Our Lives is inspired by some aspect of Elysse’s life; from composition to mix, each song reflects her devotion to her inner vision. In Rest of Our Lives, Elysse speaks her own language, and seeks to empower others to do the same.

Please visit Elysse’s Instagram for more information.