Rabbit Hole (R): How long have you been at this music thing?
Jonah (J): I’ve been doing music for over ten years now. I spent a pretty big chunk of that time playing and recording jazz music, and it’s only been the last few years that I started singing and cobbling together these little indie songs.
R: What inspires/influences you?
J: Artists who’ve been really influential to me are those who incorporate noise and dissonance into their work, and most importantly, put mood and atmosphere on the same level as melody and rhythm. A few of these kinds of artists who’ve really inspired me are Wilco, Broken Social Scene, and Tricky. These guys know how to go from the softest whisper to the loudest feedbacking guitar, something I’ve tried to emulate in my music. These types of bands inspire me to create music, but I was inspired to actually release my music by Carseat Headrest and Lil Peep. When I saw the kind of success they had had on Bandcamp and Soundcloud respectively, it made me optimistic that there would be an audience out there for my weird sadboy music.
R:There seems to be a theme of injury/hurt/illness on Get Well. Where does that come from?
J: I’ve spent a lot of my life dealing with mental illness, and as illness tends to do, it seeped into all aspects of my life. Feelings of depression and anxiety in particular really inform my songwriting and recording; illness can be kind of a language in that way. I started this album on the heels of a breakup. I was in a really toxic relationship, in which injury/hurt/illness were in ample supply. A lot of the songs reflect how I made sense of this, and in fact the very writing and recording of most of these songs was me trying to make sense of it through music. It was really cathartic and I feel like putting the album together helped me work through a lot of the pain and organize my thoughts.
R: What are some of the other themes running through the album? You described the album as “a journey from idealism to realism.”
J: For much of my life I’ve felt like all my different emotions were getting mixed up. I was depressed and falling in love and anxious and elated and hurt and aroused and just everything all at once and sometimes it all felt like one thing and I couldn't even differentiate. I started to associate the various feelings with one another, like I would find sadness attractive or happiness anxiety provoking. This idea of all these feelings moods and themes running together is a really key concept in my music. That’s how you get a boy begging to be touched in a hospital, saying he loves the pain of a girl leaving him, and wanting to smile for all the wrong reasons.
The album sort of plays as a concept album around that idealism to realism theme. The album starts with me romanticizing and fetishizing ideas of sadness and sad women, but this gives way to the realization that this is painful and harmful, not just for myself but for those I love. It ultimately ends with a bitter rejection of the harmful ideas and painful people.
R: Some tracks sound pretty saturated and lo-fi. Are you an analog guy?
J: Quite the opposite actually. I love saturated lo-fi sounds but I don’t use any fancy equipment. I have a cheap mic and a small audio interface and that’s it. I try to get a unique sound by incorporating lots of different textures and sounds into my songs, like in Steely Dan, the main electric piano loop is a voice memo of a little riff I played on a cheap Yamaha keyboard. I’m notorious among my friends for the odd ways I mix my music. Sometimes I’ll apply massive amounts of compression to master tracks, or I’ll pile on reverb and distortion till murky. I always want to go for a mix that sounds like it’s own little world.
R: Cover art is pretty clever. Where did that idea come from?
J: The cover art was dreamt up by my friend Deanna. I can’t speak for her, but I think it’s meant to illustrate someone who’s mentally ill and/or an addict, and the many people who suffer trying to deal with, love, or even fix this difficult person.
R: I want to ask about the track “Steely Dan,” but I’m not sure where to start because there’s a lot I like about it. Guess I’ll start with the obvious. Is it at all an homage to the band, or just a name?
J: “They got a name for the winners in the world, I want a name when I lose…”
I chose that name cause I felt like the situation I was describing in that song was just a really greasy Steely Dan style situation. Where there are lovers but it’s just not working and it’s all sort of seen from this muted perspective and you can’t really infer the perspective of the narrator at first listen, all of that just screamed Steely Dan.
R: You mentioned this line earlier, but what does “I just want to smile for all the wrong reasons” mean to you?
J: I think it really sums up the album as a whole. Wanting to smile for all the wrong reasons is something we’ve all felt: when something horrible happens and you burst out laughing, or for me particularly, when something sad would make me feel alive or in love. I think again it just comes back to all these mixed up feelings, and there’s something truly enthralling yet saddening about experiencing life that way. I think there’s also some salvation in that idea. There are right reasons to smile, but you can also smile for the wrong ones.
R: There's a funny moment in the song when you stop mid song to thank the listener and remind him/her to be a good person. It seems very spontaneous. How much of that sort of in-the-moment experimentation makes it into your songs? Or do you generally just have an idea and execute according to plan?
J: I grew up mostly playing jazz, so being able to improvise and adapt is really important to me. So much of what’s in my songs comes from experimenting and messing around. I actually remember throwing in that line in the middle of the night because I felt like the song needed something instead of a second verse. I just clicked record and started talking and that came out. There’s something to be said for saying how you feel when you feel it.
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You can download Get Well Soon on Bandcamp (name your price).
Matthew Ackerman, Jonah Davids
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