We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jack and the Other. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jack and the Other below.

Jack and the Other, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

Lots of practice and then lots of trial and error. The way I see it, in any creative field you need to be both stubborn and dynamic. You need to have a constitution that allows for criticisms to be heard but not let it affect your confidence and resolve. However you also need to be willing to grow and change constantly. It’s tough to align your personal growth and evolution up with that of your career, but when you do, I feel like that’s when things can really happen for an artist.

In retrospect, we both could have done so many things differently, but that sort of thinking feels a little unfair to the reality of the fruit of all our struggles. In other words, we know what we did wrong only because we’ve done them, so the lesson is to remain humble, reflective, and forgiving enough of yourself to keep trying new things.

Jack and the Other, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Jack and the Other is an indie electronic band that was formed by my brother and I in 2019. We created it in an effort to make eclectic music, unconfined by genre where we can use any musical styles and our very different musical backgrounds to influence the music. So far, we’ve put out three EPs and a few music videos with our most recent album, Sunglass, releasing in October of 2022. Since then we’ve been workin on a live show with our drummer TJ and have been playing out around Atlanta, which has been a blast!

Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

There are so many. Being a creative is as much about learning as it is about the actual act of creation, and we try to live in a constant state of actively seeking out the resources that help us thrive as artists. In bolstering our creative and professional skillset, I wish we had known how much truly valuable information is out there on the internet completely free to those who are willing to look for it. Music theory, production techniques, the science of acoustics, audio engineering, video editing, monetizing your music. These are all things that we’ve learned a great deal about by just being willing to seek it out in different corners of the internet. Of course, there’s a lot of misinformation out there too (probably now more than ever), but the great thing is that the more you start to understand something, the better you become at determining what’s useful and what’s background noise. I wish we understood earlier in our career just how much transformative information was on the internet there for the taking. For some more specific resources that may be useful for any musicians reading this and also falling into the category of things we wish we had known about sooner: BMI/ASCAP/Songtrust/Soundexchange, cloud-based collaborative platforms (Miro, Google Docs, etc.), Submithub, and grants for musicians/artists. In relation to the last point, we didn’t find out that indie musicians like us could be eligible for grants until mid-2021, which is the same year we were awarded an Artist Projects Grant from the City of Atlanta which funded our most recent album, Sunglass.
I also wish we had picked up a reading habit earlier on in life. It’s kind of a cliche to talk about how much a book an impact your life, but it’s a true cliche. Some books that I’ve read recently that I feel like have been valuable for me as a creative are Atomic Habits by James Clear and Deep Work by Cal Newport. I’m also currently reading The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp, which I’m only about halfway through but can confidently recommend to anyone pursuing a creative career in any discipline. Had I understood what can be gained from reading these types of mindset and routine-focused books earlier on in our career, there’s no doubt we would have already reaped the benefits several times over.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

I’m going to break down society into two separate groups 1) the government/lawmakers 2) everyone else. Federal, state, and local governments can support us by providing more funding and resources to creative endeavors. This is not only in regards to supplying grants for individual artists, but also supporting creative education programs in schools and non-profit community enrichment organizations that provide resources, community and education for creatives. In terms of legislation, they can pass laws which greater protect and value the creator when it comes to their actual creative product and ensuring that companies are properly compensating creatives for their work. We’re at a very pivotal moment in society right now where technology and art are intersecting in ways that could potentially discourage artists from showing their talents to the world or from ever becoming a creative in the first place. For instance, there’s now AI visual art generators which won’t pay a penny out to the artists whose work trained the algorithms. Another example is tiktok, which would not be the giant platform that it is without the use of its giant music catalog, but pays the music artist almost nothing even when their songs are used in videos with millions of hits (speaking from personal experience). In terms of everyone else, support artists that you believe in! Seek out unknown artists, tell your friends, buy their art, go to their shows. If you like a band on spotify, buy their album. If you like the guy on youtube doing painting tutorials, subscribe to his channel, go to his art exhibition if he’s local. Support doesn’t have to be financial, and it doesn’t have to be a huge effort. Some of the times we’ve felt most supported and loved as creatives have come from someone leaving a nice comment or message on social media. In short, be active with your support.

Contact Info:

• Website: JackandtheOther.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/jackandtheother
• Youtube: youtube.com/jackandtheother

Image Credits
Akila Andre Luke Usry