Page 25 - Black Velvet Issue 86

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years gave me perspective again.”
He says the song ‘Alien’ on the new album is in relation
to the heavy touring, reflecting being on the road for so
long. “When I got into this I had no idea how much you had
to tour to promote an album and when you have a little
success you’re on a hamster wheel to keep on doing it
until it doesn’t work any more. And I’ve been married for
14 years. I got married right before our first record came
out, so spending that much time on a tourbus and hotel
rooms you really start to feel isolated after a while. You
start to miss home. I think there’s a kind of melancholy-
ness to that song.”

ason realized prior to the hiatus that a break was
Jneeded – not just from touring but also from their
major label. “I think that I wanted to go back to simplicity
– of writing music for the sake of writing music. When I
started this band and started writing songs in general
when I was 15/16, it was a completely unfiltered, raw, pure,
organic thing for me. And it just so happened that ‘Hanging
By A Moment’ became the biggest song of the year and we
were selling all these records but when I started I never
thought about any of that stuff,” Jason explains. “And
once you have that kind of success you have this incredi-
ble pressure on you to follow it up, everyone wants to put
you in a genre, a box of where you fit in. It becomes kind
of a cerebral process, in the sense that you have to go into
the studio and navigate your way through making music
to get it released on a major label. Doing that over and over
again you can kind of start to lose yourself after a while.
What I wanted to do on this record was to completely get
back to the purest form of making music, which is: Does it
make you feel anything? Do I have anything to say that ac-
tually resonates with me because that’s the only way it’s
going to resonate with anybody else? So I think that’s what
a lot of the lyrics on this record kind of represent.”
The band chose to leave the major label and be an in-
dependent band. He feels that was one of the bravest
things they’ve ever done. “We didn’t lose our record deal,
we decided to leave. We could have released another
record through Interscope, and that was really, really scary
and it was a big risk but we were in a place that we wanted
to make a pure, authentic expression of the band and I
don’t feel like we felt like we could do that so we took a big
risk by leaving and going independent and picking our
own singles, making our own videos, connecting to the
fans in a real, real way – because there have been a lot of
complaints from the fans over the years where they felt like
major labels were watering down what we really do.”
In ‘Clarity’ Jason sings ‘you can fool the whole world
for a while’. We ask if he feels that musicians fool the
world.
He says yes. “It’s so funny when you watch the arc of
any musician’s career – when they start out and then they
have a lot of success and you watch how they evolve and
change throughout the years. It’s that struggle of keeping
the music pure and for yourself, a really authentic expres-
sion of how you see the world and what you’re going
through, versus having hits and really catchy songs, you
can kind of see the fun being sucked out of it in certain
scenarios to where it’s like you don’t even feel like they’re
having fun anymore and when that happens it’s a really
sad thing. It should always be fun and amazing. When it
feels like a business I think fans start to realize that’s there
and that the band’s not having fun anymore.”
Do all bands go through this, we wonder? You hear of
labels telling bands to go back into the studio to write
more songs as they’re not happy with them.
Jason says, “There are certain bands that kind of slip
through the crack and get so big that they can do whatever
they want like Radiohead or Coldplay but those are like the
1%. If you’re a band that’s trying to make a living and pay
your rent you feel like you’re obligated to give the label
what they want, which is a really sad thing because I feel
like when an artist gets deconstructed they start to lose
that magic that got them signed in the first place.”

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