We recently connected with Jamie Scoles and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Jamie thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

All of my earliest memories are of me spazzing out musically. I could never just sit still when music is playing, or sit still for that matter, but It started out with a lot of air guitar, using my dad’s tennis racket as a guitar, then to the cliche story of how every drummer starts… pulling the pots and pans out and banging on them with spoons, or in my case, chopsticks! I think you could ask anyone that knows me and they will probably say that I was always obsessed with music in general. However I think that the moment where I started to realize that I wanted to pursue music was when I was around 9 years old. I used to sneak onto my dad’s computer after school everyday and I just spent hours on hours on musical composition games until my dad got home from work. It was from then on that I just kept making music.

Jamie, 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?

I am an Asian American Female drummer, formerly a part of the first all-female pop rock band Nylon Pink. Nylon Pink was voted top all girl band in 2013 with millions of views on YouTube and songs featured on hit television shows such as; MTV’s Jersey Shore, The Hills, Oxygen’s Bad Girls Club, etc. and was honored and placed in the Hard Rock Hall of Fame in Macau and Malaysia. I taught myself to drum at the age of ten and by fourteen years old I began my music career performing with then Vietnamese pop star, Adam Ho, and performing on main street in Huntington Beach, California where I quickly landed on the front page of the local newspaper as “The Hit on Main Street”. A few years later at age seventeen I put myself out there as a solo drummer doing freestyle performances and on my 2nd gig that I booked for myself I was discovered by Nylon Pink and immediately began touring across the world and sharing the stage with artists that activated my own playing before the age of eighteen.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Back when I started my music career and during my days of Nylon Pink, it was very uncommon to see female musicians let alone female drummers. During that time it was very difficult for females to succeed in the music industry and if you did you had to follow the same image and personality that every label sells women to be. The fact that my bandmates and myself were very opposite of that we had to work extremely hard to succeed. We had to work extra hard to be seen and appreciated for our work and not our bodies. Everything we do was followed by mysogyny and being sexualized. The industry was dominated by a specific gender and race back then and no matter what we stuck together and we kept going and here we are today.. We never changed who we are for anyone. We owned and loved who we are as people and musicians. Now we have social media and so many different types of people pursuing music freely and receiving so much support. The industry is now a community. Be you, stay true to yourself, and never let anyone change you even when it feels like everything is against you.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

The most rewarding aspect of being an artist is the freedom to express yourself. There is no bigger reward than being happy. As an artist you have the freedom to let go and create without limits. There’s nothing more freeing than that.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jamiescoles/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jamiescolesmusic/
• Youtube: youtube.com/jamiescoles

Image Credits
np2 Nylon Pink Band Photo by Neil Zlozower