We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jonivan Jones a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Jonivan, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

My latest finalized full-length album of songs (due to be released in December) has been the most meaningful or the heaviest, it’s the peak of the last few years in regards to writing & recording music and also, it’s the sum of the experiences during those years as well.

I guess the backstory is that the road map I took to get here was just archaic and wild and I spent a lot of years experimenting with music and content that I created. I spent many of those years crawling around in the dark and fighting my own battles with depression and my identity.. I took risks, worked dangerous jobs, acted out with alcohol and relationships and never took the time to actually deal with some of my experiences and the deaths of a few friends that had really planted themselves down deep.

This project/Album is the turning point and the corner or the transition where I’ve given all that baggage it’s due but also began to figuratively paint with a different type of brush and paint. During those years I truly felt ragged and jangly so that became the title of this piece of work.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

I grew up with music and that’s mostly because of the encouragement of my mother but I always felt it and I’ve always had the ability to create. I was previously in the Coast Guard (a lot of my time was spent as a diver) and so I traveled all over the country and a few parts of the world. During those years I just kind of started picking up bits of things that resonated with me and mixing them with the stuff I grew up with. Whether it was art, music, culture or other ideologies, I tried to learn from it all and experience other forms of human expression. I tried to see the similarity and not the differences and I found that it was all there for anyone with an open mind to see or experience.

I had the drive to make or create during those years and one of the longest running forms for myself was music. I wrote and recorded hundreds of songs, some were experimental and some are songs that we still perform or play live. Some of that music has been lost to time but I made some connections through it and I started to see the value in that. Music and Art can be such a simple and often overlooked source of healing and inspiration. Feeling that effect was what kept me coming back to the well for more. Plus, I realized I had some more stories left to tell.

So eventually I had hit a loop and returned to a point where I started from and I realized it was time to connect with my own roots and combine my experiences and what I had picked up along the way. I started to forge what we do now and its original and sometimes intentionally simple but there’s always a story behind the song. We put on a good representation when we perform these songs live and I am proud of that not because it’s an attempt at perfection but in the spirit of a genuine existential moment in this crazy world. Recording is challenging but my aim is always to improve upon what we did last and keep it sounding good as well as moving forward in a realistic direction.

In short, I like to sound in the same ballpark live as we do in recordings and just as importantly the substance of the words and melodies that cooks up awareness of something maybe deeper.

Our Brand isn’t a brand at all, it’s more of a summary or the inevitable result of certain types of life and experiences. Like an ice cream headache or a campfire in the rain.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

There’s no shortage of entities who are looking to offer you a perception of achievement, followers, or audio streams for a monetary cost.
There is no road map for you out there in a downloadable pdf or a “small business guide to success”. We have to choose our own level of success in this world and what works for one does not work for all. That’s not to say that certain work ethic and goals are not important but there are slightly different versions of those things out there that probably best fit us individually. The lesson I’ve learned is set down and determine what your own level of success is and then seek out that which is relevant for you.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

Everyday there’s something good, something sad, something beautiful and some chapter of life ending in this world we live in. Today it’s a stranger, tomorrow it could be me or it could be someone else and those things are real and in society is not always great at stopping and expressing the significance of these things. So, I believe that these stories, moments and people are worth capturing with a certain intensity or approach that re-flashes the experiences. Maybe this is in some artwork or maybe it’s in a song but either way it deserves to have its moment. If that can be translated to get folks to think about things like empathy, self-awareness, expression or their own ideology then I believe that’s a start. We don’t really seem to have this whole thing figured out yet so I believe there should always be a moment reserved for reflection. If Art or Music can do that than what a gift, we gave ourselves on this journey.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://jonivanjonesmusic.com/home
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jonivan_jones
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jonivanjonesmusic
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/jjbuffalomusic
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/user/badfolk
• Other: https://linktr.ee/jonivanjonesmusic

Image Credits
A. Jones J. Stevenson