We recently connected with Jake Pardee and have shared our conversation below.

Jake, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Are you happy as a creative professional? Do you sometimes wonder what it would be like to work for someone else?

I play music professionally, operate a recording studio, and teach private lessons. There are many interactions and logistics that surround each of these activities. When I have a full day of work, I really enjoy having the variety of activities I find myself involved in so doing the actual work is really a great blessing – performing music, helping people to realize their creative dreams. The work itself is incredibly rewarding and I get the opportunity to collaborate with extraordinary talented and interesting people. When I consider what it would be like to have a regular job it’s usually because I am busy doing the logistics of scheduling or getting paid. Usually I remind myself that that type of activity would be a part of a regular job, too but there is a certain amount of difficulty with the unpredictability of freelance work.

I built my recording studio so I could work with amazing artists and create my own music. The challenge is scheduling the time to work on my own creative projects since a significant amount of my time is managing the details of clients using the space. In general, though I feel extremely lucky to be able to do the job I do where I’m constantly improving my craft, even when it’s not working on my own material. So, I may every once in a while think to myself “maybe if I had a regular job when I get to the studio I could just make my own music” but I’m sure whatever other job I found myself doing it would have its own challenges and be draining in its own way. Finding a balance of energy and time so I can work on my own music is a challenge I’ll have to do no matter what I do for work, so I mostly just try to keep in mind that regardless of what you do there’s going to be a lot of work involved with keeping everything running smoothly.

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 back background and context?

I’ve been playing guitar since I was a very young boy and that’s been my primary motivation for as long as I can remember. I’ve been blessed to be a part of a musical family and a very encouraging family where I had a tremendous amount of support following my passion of music. I started playing in a rock band with my friend Michael Lamarche when we were about 13 years old and our DIY shows were my first experiences with organizing our own musical community. I found that time to be very formative and inspiring so I have always been big on building a community around musical creativity.

I’m most proud of the fact that I’ve been able to create an environment with my studio, Maritime Music Studio, where the best musicians in our area get together and feel inspired to be creative and to collaborate. Over the course of any given week at Maritime we may have children as young as 4 years old playing their first instruments, a rock band rehearsing, an avant garde jazz group producing their latest album, and a voiceover recording for a major publisher’s audiobook. The fact that I’m a part of a community that values culture, musical heritage, and creativity really inspires me and I feel so honored to be able to provide a service for people who are truly great at their crafts.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Last year I had a busy summer performing and I thought I was cruising along and business was going pretty smoothly. I wasn’t saving a lot of money, but I wasn’t worried about paying the bills at the time. Suddenly September hit and everyone was really feeling the effects of raising costs of living. It seemed like everyone’s rent had increased overnight and lots of people communicated that they had to be much more cautious with their finances. This meant several of my students decided to pause lessons, bands took a break from recording, my gigs for the summer were mostly done, and I found my calendar a bit more freed up than I was comfortable with.

Once I realized the amount of work on the books wasn’t going to pay for the overhead of the studio, I quickly panicked. Not that I didn’t know I shouldn’t panic, of course I tried to remain calm but I was losing sleep worrying about how I would pay the bills. I decided what I had to do was get out there and meet people and make money with what I have to offer. I began busking in Salem, made enough money here and there, and most importantly I decided to invest in joining the Creative Collective which is a business marketing and network group for creative businesses on the North Shore.

By joining the collective and committing to attending as many coffee meet-ups and networking as much as I could, I soon entered a partnership with the Lynn Music Foundation which led me to teaching in pubic schools for the first time. Having done that, a year later I’m now pursuing a Master’s of Music Education from the University of Florida, which wasn’t really even on my radar at all last year.

If it weren’t for being broke and having to figure out whatever I could do to get out there, be a part of the community, see where my skills could help others, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today. I think resilience in the creative fields, especially in freelance work, is absolutely essential. We have to be ready to work when opportunities come along and we have to be able to weather the storm when it seems as if we’re a bit down on our luck.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)

NFTs crack me up, because of how they exploded are were such a silly concept at the time. The fundamental technology I think is great, of course. Ultimately I’d like blockchain technology and NFTs to allow for fans to have a better experience in live music. If we can leverage NFTs to create fan clubs that have direct sale tickets and cut out Ticketmaster as much as we can, I think that could help live music in general. The technology will be used to really help artists and their communities ultimately. A friend of mine really wanted me to get into making NFT music content when the big boom was happening a couple years ago and I didn’t think it made any sense for where I’m at in my career, but it’s going to be interesting to see how the tech is used in the future.

Contact Info:

• Website: jakepardee.com maritimerecording.com
• Instagram: @jakepardee @maritimerecording
• Other: I have a dub comic book! What’s that? It’s music and a comic book at the SAME TIME.

  Enter the ROJI Universe at rojiuniverse.com

Image Credits

Photos by Jake Pardee
ROJI album artwork by Veronica Funk