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

Alright, Jack thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

Making a living as an independent artist can look like a lot of different things. I, for one, am constantly hustling from one thing to the next, and earn my living from a variety of income streams and side hustles, the majority of which are (right now) not making music. My life has seasons to it, somewhere I am able to dedicate most or all of my time to creative pursuits, and others where I am deep in the weeds of another work project that keeps me from making the art I aspire to make. It’s taken years to finally reach a point where I’m okay with this tradeoff, and with time has come a wider perspective that allows me to see how each thing is not actually diametrically opposed to the other. As a handyman – who makes music – who works at a bar sometimes, its easier to think if I’m not actively making art I’m wasting the precious time I’ve been given. But really, I see that meaning can stem from this hustle. Learning how one is necessary for the function of the other has made work more fruitful and the gains sweeter. So now if I find myself painting a fence, or fixing a broken faucet, or rebuilding someone’s back porch, it no longer feels like I’m “stuck” with that task or that I’m only working to subsist. Each job is a craft slowly refined, and its money in my pocket for the next day in the studio, to print that next run of tee shirts, to put gas in the car to get me down the road to the next gig. Though I sometimes wish I had a blank check to write for all of my creative pursuits, I don’t. Now, though, I see I don’t need or want that, because the hard earned things are the ones that are the most satisfying.

Jack , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

First and foremost, I’m a songwriter. I moved to Nashville as a happily naive 22 year old and have learned dearly just how wrong my preconceived notions were. I thought I’d waltz in, sing and write what someone else wanted to hear, and quickly be on my merry way to stardom and wealth. I was soon humbled, and scrambled to figure out who I was. I feel lucky to have realized early on that, in a town where a lot of folks are chasing a trend or a paycheck, to reach deep within yourself and write things that are personal, personable, and resoundingly true is the best way to stand out. Its not easy, and as a songwriter you learn to have your songs “miss” a lot more than they “hit”, but its part of the craft. Now as I begin to release my debut album “Talking to Strangers” (which comes out June 21!) I feel like I have a catalog of songs I’m proud of, songs I can hang my hat on. When creating art, and especially when releasing it to the world, your anxieties and supposed weak spots can feel exposed to the world, especially if you’ve cut a corner somewhere along the way. I’m grateful for the amazing musicians and creatives I’m surrounded by everyday in Nashville who helped to ensure that didn’t happen, and now I have the joy of delivering this batch of songs to the world.

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

It may be a funny way to answer a question like this, but the “resource” I wish I could have learned to utilize sooner would be my fellow musicians. For whatever reason, there’s something in our society that instills this mantra of competition within us that tells us that showing weakness or anything less than mastery is comparable to failure. We walk around with this fear that if we say the wrong thing, play the wrong note, write the wrong lyric, that people will judge us, think less of us, and cast us out of something we think we want. Really, the greatest lessons I’ve learned in Nashville and the highest musical highs have come from joyful collaboration. We are all constantly striving to get better and to learn from one another, and to rely on your neighbor musician is imperative to this. Musicians are subjected to this funny and impossible challenge – to be constantly fueled by an urge for perfection within a completely subjective, unmasterless form. You will work your whole life toiling away and still not have it all figured out – that’s the point! We don’t study math or logic or law, we study emotions and how to harness them and communicate through our musical choices. That is deeply personal, and a journey that only ends when we stop toiling. I wish I had never, even for a second, thought the people around me wanted to see me fail and from the very first day I arrived in Nashville had treated every encounter as a chance to learn.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

My answer to this question is not that different from the one above. It sounds strange, but so is this life path. My driving goal is to constantly best myself as a writer, to reach deeper and to cover new ground, even when I don’t totally know what that means or looks like. I don’t chance hits and paydays because that is something else entirely. As you learn when you spend time in the music industry, there are a lot of other larger factors at play that determine if, how, and when a song becomes a “hit” – to me it’s all too complicated to rely on. What I can control, and where I do chart my progress, is at the writing table. Always trying to make the time and to instill the discipline I need to wrestle with ideas – or to mess around and explore even when there not be any concrete idea driving me. It’s a journey of discovery, and I think my goal would be to continue to be excited and amazed by that process.

Contact Info:

• Website: jackmckeonmusic.com
• Instagram: @jackmckeonmusic
• Facebook: @jackmckeonmusic
• Youtube: Jack McKeon

Image Credits
All photos by Brooke Stevens