Page 21 - Black Velvet Magazine Issue 107

BV107 pg 18-21 Jordan Red Interview.qxp_BV107 pg 21 17/12/2022 18:05 Page 4

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went to the studio, England was getting rid of masks,
Wales was getting even stricter and tracing every-
thing. It was literally like two worlds and you cross
over. That song, ‘Everything that I see, it’s a night-
mare; - I’ve got some of these lyrics in front of me.
That’s how it felt. Dystopian. It wasn’t going away. It
hasn’t gone away and it’s still a little bit up in the air.”

espite the album being born during quite a
Dnegative situation, the band still relay the
message, ‘Do not allow yourself to be a victim of cir-
cumstance. Every negative situation contains a pos-
itive alternative if you look at it.’ We ask, besides
Covid, what other situations has Dan had that first
appeared negative, but turned out to be positive?
He thinks, “Back in, I want to say 2013/2014, I
had some really bad tendonitis going on with my
wrists and then I think I tore something with my left
wrist. I didn’t have much mobility in it, and it pro-
gressively got worse, so I couldn’t play for quite a
while, which, obviously, if you’re a guitarist, you
want to play. You couldn’t do anything, you couldn’t
exercise properly, you couldn’t play, so from that
time on, I started to focus much more on songs,
songwriting and getting more into recording. I think
that that probably made me a better musician be-
cause I couldn’t rely on all the skills I’d kind of built
up before… It’s all good now, I managed to rehab it
for quite a while. For two years it was just chronic
pain, both wrists, not good. We were trying to find a
solution, trying everything like exercise, therapy,
diet, all of it. It took a while to just work its way out
of the system. The whole time I read a lot. I read
loads. I was just reading like crazy. I go through
books, a good few a week. And audiobooks. I guess
I was opening myself up to a wider perspective on
things, philosophy, I guess business stuff. It was
productive. It was probably more productive than I’d
been before. I think that probably helped a lot with
starting Jordan Red, because the way you release
music has changed so much now. The thing is, it
feels like it’s accelerated even more because of the
lockdowns and Covid and everyone being at home.
Everyone’s attention span’s non-existent and you’ve
got to catch their attention straight away, so, I think,
at least having an understanding of putting stuff out
online, how you’re going to market yourself, brand
it, you can’t overlook it. Maybe if I hadn’t gone
through that, I would have been starting from
scratch. That would have not been good.”

n ‘Don’t Let The Heavens Fall’ Daniel Leigh
Isings, ‘Time is calling, it’s a final warning’. We
end by asking what Dan wants to achieve before his
time is up in life, either in the band and just as a per-
son.
He replies, “Don’t die with the music inside of
you. That was part of what motivated starting this
as well. Time’s ticking. I guess that’s the message
of that song as well. ‘Time is calling, it’s your final
warning’. Get on with it. That whole song – it does-
n’t get misinterpreted all the time, but we’ve had
some people think it was… they’d read the title and
think it was like a Christian thing. The whole song
is really about walking away from nihilism and
carving your path, making your life – that’s what
that song’s about., I think it’s just to create as
much music as possible. You don’t want to get to
the end and be ‘I wish I did this, I wish I did that’.”

Check out Jordan Red’s debut album ‘Hands
That Built The World’, out now, – if you don’t, you’ll
definitely wish you did!
Visit www.jordan-red.com for more info.

Words By Shari Black Velvet

Photos By Marianne Harris

JORDAN RED