Coolhand Jax "No Dreams of Anything" + Interview
☆ By SAACHI GUPTA ☆
Photos provided by Coolhand Jax
AN EXPLORATION AND A REWRITING OF THE BOUNDARIES OF HIS MUSIC - Coolhand Jax serves as the recording project of 22 year-old Jake Weissman. Previously with only two tracks out in the world, Jax has managed to capture the attention of an eager audience as well as critics.
His debut EP No Dreams of Anything, out tomorrow, has been described as “Vulfpeck meets Ariel Pink meets Kevin Parker” — a psych-pop capsule looking back at the neglected beauty of freedom, fun and identity.
Music, for Weissman, has been a passion forever. His sound, he says, has evolved greatly in the last few years, perhaps augmented by his move from Massachusetts to Los Angeles.
In Weissman’s music, there is a little something for everyone. The themes he talks about are universal yet stunningly specific, the tunes he creates are heavy and light, all at once.
Read on to find about more about Coolhand Jax's musical journey, future plans and his upcoming EP No Dreams of Anything.
LUNA: How did you transition from pursuing music as a hobby to as a career?
WEISSMAN: That’s a tough one. It’s never been totally black & white. Honestly, I still don’t think I view it in that framework, as either hobby or career. It’s just a weird obsession that makes it such that it’s most of what I think about most of the time, and most of what I want to do. It doesn’t really care for classifying itself. How that translates into real life, as a way to make money maybe, is just secondary. But hobby sounds too, you know, passive maybe? I think that my mindset around music has been unwavering since I started playing guitar 13 years-ish ago, far before I was thinking about it as a hobby or a career I guess.
LUNA: No Dreams of Anything has been described as a “Vulfpeck meets Ariel Pink meets Kevin Parker” vibe. How have you seen your sound evolve since you first starting making music?
WEISSMAN: Haha, I like that description. It has evolved a lot! When I first started making music I was so obsessed with guitars; most of the songs I wrote were inspired by 70’s and 80’s rock or heavy metal. I also had a real love for blues music. I would record songs with iPod touch voice memos, borrowing my friends’ and layering over different sections. Real riff-heavy stuff. Around the time I got to highschool I started to get more into the Alt-world; the big names at that time were The Dirty Projectors, The White Stripes, Gorillaz and so on. My songwriting started to change and take on different attitudes. When I was around 15 or 16, I think indie, specifically like psych-indie, just hit this new era and exploded in a million directions. I discovered Lonerism, Rock N’ Roll Night Club, UMO’s II, Connan Mockasin’s Caramel, the earlier Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti albums. I was forever changed. It was really an important time for that world and it hit at a very important time in my life. Everything I thought about songwriting started to shift.
The last project I really wrote for was my band Sunshine Brothers Inc. There are a lot of similarities between the songwriting there and for Coolhand Jax, but Sunshine Brothers was often more of a ‘live-passing sound’ in the recordings whereas Coolhand is very much a multi-track project. I was also writing with live shows in mind, and they were sort of rowdy and high-energy, so that influenced the writing. The shtick was kinda surfy, indie, goofy. Coolhand Jax is a bit more developed on my end. It draws on more influences and allows me to take greater risks. It’s just where I’m at now. Who knows what it’ll be in a year!
LUNA: What’s been inspiring you lately? Any key references?
WEISSMAN: It’s tough because so much of what inspires me never seems to actually make it explicitly into the music. That being said, I’ve been into a lot of albums from this year. ARTHUR’s Hair of the Dog, Whitney’s Candid, Moses Sumney’s Grae, Mk.Gee’s A Museum of Contradiction, Kevin Krauter’s Full Hand. An album that’s been taking up a lot of space for me lately is Toro Y Moi’s Outer Peace from last year. I can’t even believe that record. I’ve been listening to a lot of older stuff lately too; a good friend of mine put me on to Ennio Morricone and I’ve been getting pretty lost in his stuff. Curtis Mayfield, Book of Love, Hiroshi Sato, The Magnetic Fields, Solange, The Wake, Peter Ivers, Todd Rundgren, James Blake, Yenkee. Those have all been big names for me the last few months. I’ve been keeping a playlist updated pretty frequently on my Spotify page of stuff I’m biting into.
LUNA: Can you share a favorite moment or memory from the making of the EP?
WEISSMAN: Hm. That’s a tough one. I recorded a lot of this record in my car while I was travelling across the country last year. It was a weird process; I’d be writing songs in my head and pulling over to record them in the backseat. Portable interfaces are a crazy thing. One moment that stands out in particular I guess was tracking the bassline and synth parts to ‘Backseat Swinging’. I think I was passing through Kansas, driving something like 9 hours from Denver to Topeka. I stopped over at a reststop, just myself and a dozen truckers or so parked, after hearing “Me and My Woman” by Shuggie Otis. It has this killer bassline that just kinda overreaches and dominates. I was totally inspired. It was all pretty fluid with ‘Backseat’, it just kind of rolled off. The bassline and little choppy synth just felt so nice together in my head. I was really getting into it in my car, they probably thought I looked like such an idiot.
LUNA: Were there any common themes or narratives explored through the project?
WEISSMAN: For sure. It wasn’t really intentional, but they also sort of ended up being about a lot of the same things. It had to do a lot with where I was at. I finished school a semester early and went on this big long open ended trip. I had been going to school, working, and playing shows around the Northeast for a few years at that point. Sunshine Brothers Inc. played one big last sold-out show and then I split. It was the longest break from anything I’d ever taken. I was in this weird in-between, where everyone back home was either beginning or about to begin their careers, and I was just out in the middle of nowhere, just taking everything all in. For the first time in my life I sort of saw the raw value of idleness. I was surviving on very little, maybe $5 to $10 dollars a day in food, and staying with people I knew or sleeping in my car for the most part. I felt really free. The songs ended up reflecting that feeling and those ideas. They sort of juxtaposed myself from the hyper-productivity of the rest of the world. But I was also juxtaposed locationally, ya know? They’re equal parts excited and fearful about being nowhere doing nothing. About rethinking what it means to have no dreams of anything.
LUNA: You have a really fun visual aesthetic going on between the “Backseat Swing” and “Everybody Else” videos. Why is it important for you to tap into the visual side of your work? What role are you playing with that usually?
WEISSMAN: It is a lot of fun! I’ve always really loved music videos. My brother and I would sit down and watch the full VH1 Top 20 Countdowns all the time as kids. I also think they help so much to better conceptualize an artist. I think, especially for a first release, I really wanted to communicate to my audience who I was and what I was about, and music videos are such a great medium for that. Visuals say infinitely more than words in my opinion. I’d like to continue making as many as possible.
For ‘Backseat Swinging’, I directed the video. It was early on in quarantine, and I was staying in Arlington, Texas for a few months, skipping out on LA for a bit. I was going for a run when the idea for the video came to me. Since we couldn’t use any actors or anybody else in it because of quarantine, I thought maybe it would be funny to just clone myself in different fits. The whole shoot took about 4 hours and cost maybe $40. It was a lot of fun. A good friend of mine helped me edit it once I got back to LA.
‘Everybody Else’, and the other two videos I have coming out, were co-directed by my friend James Wyatt & I. We’ve been calling our partnership “Jake & James Baby”. Again, it was fully hands on, which was great. We had full creative control. I think they came out really cool. Again, they were all shot within the backdrop of COVID, so their time stamped by all these little idiosyncrasies. I’m really excited for the other two to drop.
LUNA: Do you have any key inspirations for the visual end of things?
WEISSMAN: We spent a lot of time prior to making the videos just watching a lot of music videos and pointing out what we liked. There are so many amazing videos coming out all the time. I’m also into movies; not to the extent that a lot of people in LA are, but probably more than the average person. We went for different things at different times. I think in ‘Everybody Else’ we tried to capture the cheesy 80’s feel-good visuals from time to time. For ‘No Dreams of Anything’ we definitely tried to take a more surrealist edge; some shots feel like they’re out of Paris,Texas, others feel like they could be part of a bad horror movie. I’d like to make a real movie someday.
LUNA: How has quarantine impacted your creative process as a whole?
WEISSMAN: Honestly, it hasn’t helped much. I think that I’m someone who’s creative process is fed by lived experience. Things have been pretty stagnant in my personal life and I guess it’s been a bit harder to feel inspired. The state of our country in general- from COVID, to police brutality, to natural disasters, to unemployment and the housing crisis, to the election- also can take a toll on that process for me. I get wrapped up in the news cycle, which I think is important, but sometimes it is hard to focus on things that seem, in the grand scheme of things, more trivial. I’ve been trying to be useful to movements I believe in. I’m trying to find that balance.
LUNA: What do you want your listeners to take away from your music?
WEISSMAN: I think, at a minimum, I want them to have fun listening to it and feel liberated in some way. The best music to me always feels liberating in one way or another. I write songs that are a bit more serious or downtrodden but at this point in my life, I just want to make and put out things that feel fun. I know that’s kind of vague and some of the songs on this record themselves aren’t about ‘fun’ in the conventional sense, but it’s just a feeling I get.
For this record in particular, I hope listeners rethink their own value systems about idleness and work and freedom and the future. The songs are essentially questioning those things. What is the value of not projecting yourself into the future, especially if that future is wrinkled by a lot of factors you’re not willing to consider? What is the value of accepting freedom, here and now, as the ability to do more-or-less what you want to do on any given day? I guess, more generally, are you happy with where you’re at and where you’re going?
LUNA: Now that this project is out, what do you hope the rest of 2020 brings you?
WEISSMAN: I’m sitting on a few more songs right now. I’d like to put out at least one more before the year ends. I hope that I can hit a creative stride and spend more time making stuff. Besides that, good health and peace of mind. This year has been a whirlwind; more has changed than I could have possibly anticipated. For myself & the world, of course. I hope it’s possible to play these songs out in person come some point next year!
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