Jon James: Blog

So, Au Contraire is out. What of it? What next? The big push? The international tour?Listen, I appreciate those of you who’ve hailed it as a magnum opus. All five of you. Thank you, my kind friends & family (and that one eager dude from France).Let’s get on the level and call it a work in progress. In the meantime, I’ve been wholly diverted. See, I adore volume and pumping rhythms and big, dumb sing-along hooks. But look around, man, rock-n-roll – for me, anyways – is feeling a little formulaic. Tired and trivialized. Today, it’s got me a little dismal. Maybe it’s a spring cleaning thing. Ask tomorrow, I’m bound to have a different assessment.No one likes being part of the problem. No one likes feeling confined. The whole pull of picking up a guitar and singing – it’s a liberating thing, hopefully. Come on, how else can we explain Rock Band™? Lately, I got scads of random debris-of-the-mind that I’m hard-pressed [...]

“Death by misadventure.” That’s what the British papers read at the time.Hard to believe, but it’ll be 30 years today since Bon Scott kicked the oxygen habit. I couldn’t go without saying a bit about that.Never got to see Mr. Scott perform; in fact, never even became familiar with him until after he died. By the time I was 11 or 12 though, I was an AC/DC fanatic. At that age, I don’t know precisely what I understood about the man, much less the substance of what he was singing. I knew I could play all the chords to all their songs, which just felt amazing. And I knew my parents thought Mr. Scott was dangerous. All in all, a pretty dang good start.Looking back, I think I’m even more appreciative now than I was then. First of all, the voice – inimitable. Then there are the lyrics – variously hard-knock blues and hormonally-infused, but with all sorts of clever, wily twists. I suppose there were a lot of fathers out there who warned [...]

OK, so I’m realizing this blog could collapse quickly into a forum for random rants. I say, what the hey. Embrace it. So, here we go. It’s official.Random Rant #1: XYZ Coffee’s "Handcrafted Oatmeal"(Where XYZ = a certain corporate coffee chain)Who is the genius that came up with this linguistic fluff? "Handcrafted?" What sort of craftsmanship or level of said hand-involvement does oatmeal preparation involve other than boil & stir? I suppose there are a number of ingredients or toppings that could be sprinkled in with a certain dexterous flourish.Please be clear. I visit XYZ with some frequency. They make a mean Americano, and the staff at my fave location are all exceedingly fine, congenial folks. But I saw this "handcrafted" campaign on the side of a bus this morning and felt like I was missing out on something crucial. I needed to understand.So I visited XYZ's website, where a carefully-calculated promotion page has been laid out in full force. They also [...]

When I was a kid, album reviews were the first thing I thumbed through when Rolling Stone arrived in the mail. Today, I still like to visit sites like Pitchfork and Lost at Sea. In the music biz, it’s an oft-cited mantra: “reviews don’t sell records.” Perhaps that’s true, but they certainly keep one in-the-know about what’s current and hopping – and, personally speaking, even if they don’t drive me directly to purchase, I have absolutely no doubt they shape my listening habits and inclinations in the larger scheme.In fact, years back, I even did my own critical stint as a writer for a certain Austin, TX-based music publication. Now, I won’t sit here and pretend what I wrote served as some crucial taste-making barometer for its reading audience. I will tell you I verbally tore down more than a couple CD releases and, for that, have probably incurred a good dose of shitty karma for some time yet to come.Elvis Costello, in characteristically [...]

Questions. I get questions. (The first one usually: "are you drunk?")Let's say first and foremost I'm not an answers sort of guy. When people ask when and where they can expect a live show for Au Contraire -- a CD release party, so to speak -- I get a bit stuck. And so I shall start by deflecting, right off the bat. Because it's a solo record. And I presently have no band. Or, for that matter, a band plan. And deflection is my middle initial.The other questions revolve around the record itself, and those I feel nominally more qualified to entertain. But although I say solo, this hardly got pulled off without outside help. So the thing demanding initial mention is the other people involved. I'd like to begin by trumpeting Patrik and Joe. 95% of the tracks on Au Contraire were done at Patrik's studio, Dark One. It was a long process involving a day or so of tracking, here or there, followed by many months of out-and-out inactivity. The question heard most often throughout that three-year [...]