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

Jules, appreciate you joining us today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

Throughout my career, I’ve learned that taking risks is the only way that you’re going to move forward. When I first started making music, I wanted my music to be consumable to large audiences, something digestible so that people wouldn’t have a chance to say no to. After years of trying that, I realized that I was beginning to sound like everybody else, and audiences actually had the opposite reaction; they didn’t care about it at all. The biggest risk I ever took in my music was starting to release music that scared me. I started releasing songs about my queerness, my treacherous relationship with my mother, and the true dirt that was behind all of my relationships. My career, for the first time, began to take off. I think the hardest part about this was that while I had good responses from people, I also had very negative ones. The internet can be a cruel place and hate comments at times have really gotten to me. But through this, I’ve learned that I’m not going to make a difference if nobody has their thinking challenged.

Jules, 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?

My name is Jules Paymer and I’m a singer/songwriter! I grew up in a musical family, my parents were both in the film industry and huge theater kids and were always singing. They say that I was singing before I was talking. I always knew I wanted to do music because nothing else ever made sense to me. I spent my whole childhood like a regular kid in LA, I went to school everyday just to come home and sit on my bed and write songs by myself. I ended up going to college for music in Nashville, Tennessee, and moved back to LA almost two years ago now. I’m a queer indie pop artist who writes music to challenge people’s way of thinking, make people feel understood, and aim to make queerness universal.

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

Growing up with artists like Damien Rice, Cage the Elephant, and Conor Oberst, I felt like they had the words I didn’t, and I wanted to make other people feel as understood as those artists made me feel. The most rewarding aspect of being an artist or creative for me is when people tell me that I gave them the words they didn’t have.

How did you build your audience on social media?

My two pieces of advice for social media are consistency and authenticity. Seriously, people can tell when you’re not being yourself. It comes out through the screen. We live in a world of numbers of data but always remember: that one person liking your posts or buying your art or coming to shows is one real person. One real fan is better than 10 random followers. Slowly building a diehard fanbase is better than passive fans.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @julespaymer
• Facebook: @julespaymer
• Twitter: @julespaymer
• Youtube: @julespaymer
• Other: TIKTOK : @julespaymer

Image Credits
Flasch, Nicole Ditt