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

Anson, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What was the most important lesson/experience you had in a job that has helped you in your creative career?

This isn’t technically a story from a job, it’s a story from school, but I think it still counts. An instructor once told us that if you don’t embarrass yourself once or twice on stage, you’re probably being boring. It kind of blew my mind. Boring? That’s the worst thing to be! Much worse than making mistakes. So my whole thinking changed – when I got on stage, I planned to try new things, and I planned to make mistakes. Then, when one happened, I noticed, let it pass, and focused on what was happening next. I noticed that I usually had the best ideas right after I did something that sounded stupid. When you start rewarding yourself for the right attitude, instead of chastising yourself for the outcome, you open up your creativity and have more fun. Most importantly, you learn about yourself – you’ll make different mistakes than anyone else, and those differences are what make you sound like yourself.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m a singer-songwriter from New York City and my passion is mixing old and new styles of music. I started learning music pretty early – I followed in my older brother’s footsteps to take piano lessons and sing in the school choir. We were mostly doing classical music, but at home it was a lot of rock, jazz, and funk. Both of my parents have pretty exploratory music tastes, and they introduced us to many worlds of sounds. Eventually, it was clear that neither of us were committed to classical music, and my parents switched us over to a teacher that let us pick our own songs, showed us the classics, taught us about the blues, and let us improvise. We were finally more self-directed – which meant I learned a LOT of Adele songs in this period…. Later on, I had a lot of interests – I minored in architecture, computer science, cognitive science (yes, total nerd here) – but musically I focused in on jazz, throwing myself into theory and composition. These days, though, I tend to live more in the indie/folk/singer-songwriter world. I guess it changes all the time.

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

There are so many that it’s hard to pick just one, so I’m going to make a little shortlist in no particular order
Stage Performance (Livingston Taylor) – an incredible dive into what it means to be a performer. Helped me gorw immensely.
Uptime (Laura Mae Martin) – yes, it is actually that helpful.
Effortless Mastery (Kenny Werner) – I know, I know, it’s overplayed. But still really good.

Honorable mention: The Dot (Peter H. Reynolds) – this is a kid’s book about what it means to be creative that has left a lasting impression on me. I think about it often to this day.

Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

I wish that I knew how much people want to help. I know that’s not exactly a specific reference material or book or anything, but I really think it’s important for young artists to know that the people around them just want to help however they can. It’s so daunting to ask someone for their connections, or advice, or support, but that’s really where the magic happens. I think I took a while to learn that asking for those things is more than okay – it’s the whole point.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.AnsonVoice.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ansonjonesmusic/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AnsonVoice/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC04cPJD9tmEEExjcWjXy78A
• Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/ansonjonesmusic

Image Credits

Timothée Lambert
Robbie Michaels