INTERVIEW: BABYJAKE
Photo Credit: Bobby Kelly
Interview by Deja Tribbitt
The only thing I can hear is thundering drum beats in the Sonia Live Music Venue when I arrive to speak with genre-defying artist BabyJake. He’s touring his recently released 6th studio album “Beautiful Blue Collar Boy,” and I was lucky enough to sit down and chat with him after sound check.
Deja Tribbitt (DT): How has the tour been going?
BabyJake (BJ): Tour’s been good. Yesterday was our best show–New York. We changed the setlist. We were really, really hot. We had a big, probably 350 people in the crowd. It was great. Tonight should be a good night, too. I’m expecting probably close to 200 or something like that, so it should be fun. I think we needed the first two shows in Carrboro [North Caroline] and [Washington] D.C. to be smaller shows to work shit out, which was nice. They were still great, but we were still working stuff out. We cut a couple songs today, and we reworked the setlist again today, so I’m very excited. Obviously, my voice is a little gone, but I’m very excited about the structure of what we’re playing today. I think it’s going to be the best structure that we’ve had thus far, even though maybe our energy left depleted, but we actually slept last night, at least a bit, so that’s good. But yeah, it’s been amazing so far. New York’s always great. To play Boston on a Thursday–right, it’s Thursday–is great. Philly tomorrow should be a fun time, so I’m just stoked to be out and be doing it, you know?
DT: You’ve released six albums since 2021, of them being a demos album. How do you stay motivated and inspired to make new music?
BJ: I love it so much. I don’t know what else I would do, really, you know? I mean, I love it so much. I love creating the music. This past album, “Beautiful Blue Collar Boy,” that I just released, I produced like 70% of it myself. I just love it. I love the creation of it. I love playing it live. I love being around it. I love hearing it–when it’s good. Hopefully, we are tonight, fingers crossed. (Laughs) It’s easy, it’s a bad answer, because I feel bad for people that you know like I always have this phrase, and I don’t really mean it; so obviously inspiration is a real thing, but I always say inspiration is kind of bullshit, because if you’re a writer, you write, right? Or if you’re an artist, you go and sing and perform. So, for me, it’s just I think I got such in the habit of just doing it, to where I just kind of always feel motivated. I always feel excited to go and play a show. I always feel whether it’s for 20 people or 200 or 5000 or whatever, I’m excited to do it to improve, to build a fan base, to build a relationship with my fan base.
I learned so much throughout the process of my career so far. I’ve just learned what I want and what I don’t want over the last eight- nine years. And that’s huge. I feel like I’m kind of a baby again in the sense of what I’m actually doing with my career. You know, this feels like the first time. This album, “Beautiful Blue Collar Boy,” that’s like a rebirth of me with a good team, a good independent label behind me who cares who’s pushing a good team around me, and a great band. It feels really good to be able to know what I want. For a long time, I don’t think I knew what I wanted. Not saying I hate my old music; I love my old music–we’re playing a lot of old songs tonight. I’m so motivated to just do it. To just do it and make a living from it is enough for me, you know? Obviously, it would be amazing to sell 5000 tickets a night, but I’m not upset about where I am with my major career, or what’s going on in my touring life, or in my recording life, or my stats, or anything. All I know is that I love what I’m doing and what I’m putting out. And that’s putting my 110% into everything from the show to the artwork to the colors to the schemes to everything to where I’m happy, at least with that. To me, that’s a win. That motivates me to just continue being happy with it and not regretting anything, because I think maybe in the past, I have.
DT: How did you get into music? Is there one moment you can look back on that made you know that you wanted to be a musician?
BJ: I guess, funny enough the real answer to that is college. I fucking hated college. I went to college and I was like, “This is not for me.” Not because I was dumb or anything; I was intelligent, for sure, but for me, my first love was basketball. I loved basketball. I wanted to be a professional basketball player, still do. I played football too. I was actually maybe better at football but not as passionate about it. Basketball I loved, and I really wanted to go and do it, and I could have gone to college and played, but by that time, I was already phased out of it and knew what I wanted to accomplish. I could have gone D2 or D1 at a smaller school, but I wanted to go to Kentucky or Duke or whatever. It wasn’t going to happen, I just wasn’t that good. I was good, but not that good. So, when I went to college, I had always played the guitar. Since I was eight years old, my dad taught me guitar a little bit, well, the basics. I guess he doesn’t really play, but taught me the basics. Then, on YouTube and Instagram, I learned to put out little snippets here and there. But I think really what changed everything for me was just not enjoying school. I went to University of South Florida, and I was studying marketing. I was just like, “What the fuck am I gonna do with it? How does this work for me, you know? What do I love in this?” And I couldn’t find an answer. I just kind of was not into school. One thing led to another, and I started playing more often, and some of my best friends in college were like, “Hey, you should do this shit for real.”
This is a fun story. Valentine’s Day in February 2015–almost ten years ago, wow–was the first time I recorded in a proper studio. I borrowed money–$1,000 from my dad. I was like, “Please, I need the money.” I was like, please. He’s like, “Are you gonna make it back?” I’m like, “I’ll make it back, they got Valentine’s deal at the studio. I want to record my first EP. I promise I’ll pay it back,” knowing like that I was broke, knowing I couldn’t pay it back at all. That EP six months later, maybe not even that long, three or four months later, had a couple songs that got playlisted on Spotify early days. I had this song called “Little Mess” that kind of changed my life before [Cigarettes on Patios] changed my life in a much smaller sense. That’s what I first knew, like, oh, I can do this. I can really do this. So, my friends really encouraged me that I went to school with, and after a year, I dropped out of school, stayed in Tampa for about a year, and then I just kept doing it. I would say that was the main breaking point for me that was, like, I need to do this. It wasn’t really a youth thing. I mean, I wanted to be a guitar player when Guitar Hero and Rock Band and all that shit came out, who didn’t, you know? I was always singing, but I didn’t realize I was writing because I hated covers. I hated learning songs. I wanted to create my own thing, because I was always creative and had a big imagination, so I wanted to create my own thing. I picked up guitar and did that, but I just didn’t know it was called writing songs. I didn’t know they were songs when I was 13, 14 years old, messing around with FruityLoops. I started with some friends and we were like, 13, 14, thinking we were making bomb beats. You can still find them. Powor Music Producers on YouTube, you’ll find some beats from like 13 years ago, that you’ll be like, holy shit, these are horrible, but we thought they were so hot. I guess that was the turning point: college. We’ll go with that.
DT: You jump around genres a lot in your music, is there any genre that you identify with? Or do you think that genre is important for musicians at all?
BJ: I think genre-ing as a verb is very important for artists. I don’t think genres necessarily are important, but genre-ing. Like when you hear my live show, I’m genre-ing Cigarettes on Patios, even though it’s a pop song, we make it alternative. If you ask me what genre I am now, the broadest spectrum I can say is alternative because alternative is anything from Oasis to Dominic Fike to even Chappell Roan is probably alternative to me. Maybe poppy too, but her shit’s alternative. There’s a lot of guitars in it, there’s some live drum samples and stuff. My genre–I’ll go with alternative and or indie alternative. As far as how important it is, I just think it’s really important to put your best foot forward for the live show to make sure it doesn’t sound weird. If you’re gonna do every genre or a lot of genres, just make sure that the live show sounds cohesive. That’s been the biggest challenge with my music, in general. But I think now I’ve gotten really good at it, and it sounds very cohesive, even though some of the older music was a lot more poppy than the newer stuff. My new album, to me, is indie rock, you know, but I don’t know, like some other person might say it’s indie or pop or alternative pop or whatever. I don’t know how to classify it, so I just tell people alternative.
DT: How do you go about writing your songs and getting inspiration for your lyrics?
BJ: Depends. A lot of times, like I said, I view it as writing is my job. I love it for sure, but I wake up and I’m just like, “I gotta do this. This is my job.” If I don’t look at it that way, I won’t do it every day, and as long as I do, [I] do it to some extent, every day. Same thing with touring. As long as I’m touring two, three times a year I stay fresh and excited about it. But the moment that I kind of let it go is when you start to dread those things and not really have that spark right, that lightning. But for writing, for me, it’s all different types of ways. I have a lot of snippets that I start just on voice memos on my phone all the time, like on the road, off the road, at home. I’m literally writing something or mumbling something once a day. Literally so, and probably 90% of it never gets fucking used, but the 10% does, and I think that for me, typically, if I were to write a song, I would write the lyrics in the guitar part or piano or, at the same time. Nowadays, not always in the past. I’ve done, like, here’s the beat, very pop approach, here’s the beat, lay the top line on it. But currently, I always start with an instrument and I’m writing at the same time, then I’m coming out with the melody and the chords. It’s kind of a cohesive thing going on.
DT: How was writing and recording, “Beautiful Blue Collar Boy” different from your earlier albums?
BJ: Oh, man, great question. It was different because I did it in Nashville. I actually did the “Aren’t We Ever Gonna Be More Than Friends” album in Nashville too, but that album was a situation in which I had a lot of live–well, I guess I did in a similar way–but it was a lot of [the tracks] were live with a band in room. We recorded some without a metronome, some with a metronome, but, like, it was a live recording versus this new album was like piece by piece, except for “Lightning Yellow Hair” and one other song, but most of it was like piece by piece. I would be like, “Hey, Tim, come over and lay the drums” and then I would play the guitar, and then I get a bass friend. I had so many awesome players on “Beautiful Blue Collar Boy” in Nashville that were just so talented, and that made the album, in my opinion. And I think that in general, you can hear that in the sound and in the production of the album, where you’re like, “Okay, clearly Jake’s not playing all this shit or, clearly they didn’t just sit down and say, let’s play the chords. They thought about it.” I was really thinking about now I write my music because I love touring and playing live so much. I really do. I love it, except when my voice is losing itself, but because I love it so much, I write songs now, thinking of the live aspect. So I’m always like “Where’s the clap part? Where’s the phones up part? Where’s the chant? Where’s the get as low as you can and jump? Where’s this? Where’s that?” That’s how I think about the music now on a listening kind of spectrum, too. Because in my opinion – I just said this to my agent – not all music has to break on DSPs or on Tiktok or socials or whatever. You can break music live still, and I’m really pushing that agenda. I’m also pushing socials, but what comes naturally to me is playing a lot and being very confident when I’m playing, when I’m recording. I think the biggest thing that is the difference in “Beautiful Blue Collar Boy” and some of my older stuff is just how much involvement there was from amazing players within the Nashville area.
DT: Did prioritizing the live aspect of the music influence you to take a more alternative rock style for this album?
BJ: Yeah, but I kind of lean that way. To answer that question, it really starts in like 2021, when COVID is coming to an end-ish. We started doing rehearsals, and I was playing some of my first shows. I’m still living in Los Angeles at the time, and I heard some of these songs with a [drum] pad and this and different things. I was like, “Man, this sounds lame. This is not what I want to do,” don’t want to have three players on here playing like parts, and then the rest of it’s coming through the speakers. Now we run tracks with our stuff as well, but we’re also playing. We’re running tracks for the shit that we can’t afford, like a horn section, a[n] organ player, another two players playing percussion, like shit that I can’t bring on the road right now. One day I hope to bring everybody, like bring 10 people on the stage. But, right now, we’re using it in a tasteful way, versus back then in 2021 going into 22.
Like I just was so anti that, so it swung me, and I was leaving the label. We were butting heads. They didn’t understand what I wanted to do, and I started to fall in love with the sound that I always loved, which was rock and roll music and alternative music. I always loved that aspect and the live aspect so when I started to push that direction, just naturally, the pendulum just swung. But it swung a little too far, like, where I grew the shag out and wore blouses with bell bottoms, I was like, “I’m never gonna use any. I’m all analog. I’m never using any digital.” Where now, “Beautiful Blue Collar Boy” swung back to the middle, and to me, this album is closer to “Don’t Give Me Problems, Give Me Wine,” “Head In The Clouds,” “Confidant,” those songs. Like this is just a little bit more live and a little bit more because the drums are [live]. The one thing that I realized throughout all this is I really love live drums. Real drum sounds, to me, dictate whether a song is alternative or pop. You could write a pop song over a live drum loop, and it’s going to sound a little alternative. That’s like Coin. That’s like [The Band CAMINO], like, those people are pop, but they’re alternative, you know what I mean? So I’m trying to be in that kind of direction with things. I swung so far this way and so far that way, where now I feel like that pendulum swung in the middle. I’m rested. I’m not thinking about, like I said, the genre or anything. The only thing I know is I want the live drums or a drum machine or loop or something that makes it feel alive, and whatever genre or whatever writing comes out of me is going on the page. That’s also why I feel like [with] “Beautiful Blue Collar Boy,” each song to solve doesn’t sound the same. There’s some that match together. Like “Cattle Dogs & Prairie Sheep” and “Momma 212,” you’re like, “Oh, yeah, this sounds more like 90s rock.” Then you have “Lightning Yellow Hair,” which is clearly a country song, and We, You, and I, which is clearly a “Harry’s House” Harry styles type song. I think that long story short, over time, overseeing the development of me as a live artist and seeing what I wanted what I didn’t want out of other artists is what influenced me to push more in an alternative direction overall.
DT: On this latest album, do you have a favorite song or one that you think speaks to you most as an artist, like right now on October 17?
BJ: I like that. Right now, on October 17, on the new album. That’s so hard… Yeah, man, fuck, that’s hard. I’m gonna go with “Arian(e).” That’s my favorite. The Ariane was actually in the crowd of New York last night; maybe that’s why. We’re good friends now. It was a wild thing, but her first time hearing the song live and all this stuff. I went on an opening slot with Hobo Johnson about maybe three months or four months ago, and I just played acoustic. We played the House of Blues here great, and it was really scary, but to play [“Arian(e)”] acoustically, and then move to my own little headline tour and go and play like this, like Sonia’s (the venue we’re at) and have 200 people show up and get to play it on that level with a band is so cool. It feels so personal, you know, so I’m gonna go with “Arian(e)” for now. My runner-up is “Cool Down Maria.” That one is just a song that I hated when the album came out. Because it was the first, or the second song done on the album, and I think we improved so much, and I improved so much as a producer and an engineer, by the end of the project where I listen back to the mix in the vocal recording I was like (shudders), but like when we play it live and also like the song is great, like people don’t listen, people, listen to like the lyrics and the melody, the flow of the song. They’re not like, “Oh, there’s a buzz on that.” You know what I mean? So that’s my runner up pick, that’s a close tie right now, because live, I think our group together does it really well.
This interview was edited for clarity.