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

Alright, Jeremy thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. 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.

Music is a life-long study; you will never finish, you will never learn enough, and that’s what I like about it. With that in mind, I think it’s fair to say that I haven’t learned my craft yet, but I’m in the process. I’ve never taken a break from music, so I’m skeptical that I could have sped up the process via another route.

Studying music comes in two forms: the intellectual and the practical. The intellectual side of music can be learned in only a few years of school but the practical side–the actual real-life practice of writing and performing music–will take the rest of your life. Mastering that consists of playing every day, playing with a variety of people, playing in various settings and situations, and constantly challenging yourself to improve your skill. That isn’t something that happens fast. But, if you love music, learning and practicing are the fun part. I like the process. I like to learn things that are difficult to do. That’s the part that gives me the most joy.

I started playing violin at age 8. I loved Mozart and Beethoven and Bach. That became the foundation for everything that came afterward. My dad loved jazz which led to me picking up the saxophone at age 10. The real shift came when my babysitter turned on MTV and Prince came on the screen. I hadn’t given popular music much thought up to then, but there was something about him that I found fascinating. So, I picked up the guitar and that became my obsession from then on. I practiced day and night and found time for very little else. My neighborhood friends even thought I had moved away because it had been so long since they had seen me.

I spent the next nineteen years writing songs, playing in bands and gigging all over the country. Those were the years that I spent learning how to be a performer, how to play with other musicians and how to write an interesting song.

Eventually, I was asked to write music for a couple commercials and amazingly I enjoyed the process, but I started to feel that my lack of musical knowledge was holding me back, so when I was thirty, I enrolled in college to learn music formally. Those were heady years of discovery and utter poverty. I wrote commercial jingles to pay my way through music school and I went to school to improve my jingle writing skills. Work and school had to achieve a symbiosis for the scheme to work. And happily, that’s what happened.

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

I started like a lot of people in my business, playing in bands and performing in every broken-down club in the country. Eventually, that led to signing with a record label and getting a bit of notoriety. My band had relocated from Nashville to Los Angeles, where we attracted the attention of several music supervisors who then placed our music in television shows and films. I was asked to write a piece of music for a commercial, which I did with my band. Suddenly I found myself with something I never had before: money. This was a new feeling that I liked very much. I decided to pursue this new line of work and enrolled in college to study music formally. My new education meant that I was a classically-trained punk rocker, which is a fairly small niche.

I continued writing music for commercials and eventually was asked to score a feature-length film. After scoring a couple films, I was hired as an on-staff composer for a music house in L.A. which led to working on hundreds of television shows. My years there led to my interest in producing music and I’ve been lucky to work with some amazing artists on their music.

I love the variety in my career. This year, for instance, I’ve scored a feature film, produced a full-length record, and done several commercials and television cues. On top of that, I have my own musical project called “Remy Nova” that I release music under. Changing gears constantly gives my creative side vitality.

Have you ever had to pivot?

When I was thirty years old, I was in a very bad car accident in which I fractured my neck in several places and tore the muscles and ligaments that held my head up. After months in a neck-brace, I found that I couldn’t hold a guitar for more than a few minutes without pain.

Up to this point, I thought of myself mainly as a guitar player. Sure, I sang and wrote songs, but the thing most people were interested in was my skill on the guitar. This presented a problem. Was my career over? Or do I find a different path to pursue?

I decided to double down on the music career and enroll in music college. I took piano classes and concentrated on getting gigs as a singer. To my surprise, singing became the new thing I was known for, and I was able to book more gigs than ever. Studying music in school gave me deep knowledge of music which added depth to my writing that I never had before.

That accident led to a completely new path that I hadn’t considered.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

I think the answer is in the question. The best part of being creative is creating. I like making things. I think I got that from my dad. He was a machinist and loved the act of creating. I inherited his love of creating. But where he dealt with materials like metal, I use the more esoteric medium of sound.

There is a certain magic feeling that comes from starting with nothing and ending up with a song, or a poem, or a painting. It’s the thing that continually blows my mind. I’m always asking myself, “Where did that come from?” The truth is I don’t know, but I’m glad I was there when it happened.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.jeremylittlemusic.com, www.remynova.com
• Instagram: @gogojermo, @remynovamusic
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@RemyNova-m5u

Image Credits

Asia Mechikoff