After an extremely successful year of performing throughout the UK as well as releasing their debut album here, John and Jacob gave us an inside look into how they feel about touring, their music influences as well as what advice they would give to brand new UK artists.
How are you enjoying Glasgow?
Jacob: So, we literally just got here. Last time we were here though we got to enjoy like a lot more – we’ve been here how many times now?
John: 3rd of 4th time here now.
Jacob: Yeah, we love it here. Yeah, but this time, our hands are so cold because we just got here.
Who are your music influences, together as a band and separately as individuals?
John: We all listen to a lot of the same music; you know? When we’re all travelling around back in The States, we’re all in a van together. We all like the same kind of music, you know? Stuff like ELO, The Beach Boys, The Beatles, but you can also go to stuff like Michael Jackson and other indie-type bands. You name it – we like just about everything.
So, you’ve done a few support slots before, so what do you like most about supporting?
Jacob: Well, I mean, it takes a lot of pressure off of you with you know, not being the headliner but there’s also pressure I guess because you’re the first people on and not a lot of people are going to know who you are. We like that though. We like going out there with, it could be a crowd with nobody having ever heard of us because we love playing and just want to play for people, period. If they know who you are or they don’t, we just enjoy playing. We like supporting but we just can’t wait until we are headlining over here and we can bring our full band.
Speaking of touring, what do you like about touring overall?
John: Probably the travelling. We get to see a lot of things that most people would probably not get to see. As far as travelling to the UK for one thing. Being from Alabama, actually most people can say they’ve never done that. So that’s definitely a perk! You also get to see different cultures and cities and things that you see in the history books, in person.
What pushed you towards wanting to make music as a career?
Jacob: It was just one of those things for me that I just always wanted to. It started off with trying to do drums then after that I picked up the trumpet and then I realised that people didn’t want to hear a trumpet and you couldn’t sing and do that at the same time so I picked up the guitar. I think it’s just something in you as a musician that you just always want to create.
You guys have come over here and established a fan-base and therefore what advice would you give to new artists that really want to do well within the industry over here?
John: You have to stay at it. You have to keep coming here and not think that if you come over once and expect for it to grow from that. You have to get your feet on the ground and get up in front of people, play your songs and connect with them in order to grow with your fan-base.
Jacob: And don’t stop, just keep writing.
We also know you guys had an Opry debut a little while ago.
Jacob: October 13th
So, what was that like?
John: It was amazing. You always hear about the Grand Ole Opry and it’s such a milestone type place to go to and so the fact that we got to do that so early on, was so cool. It was a big mark off the checklist. You know, we joined a lot of greats when we stepped on the stage that night and so it was very surreal. Crazy.
What made you think that country was the way you wanted to go?
John: Um, it’s really not. We just write music and it may come off a little bit country but we love rock ‘n’ roll music, pop music, electronic music. We just write songs. We’re from Alabama and we live in Nashville, so automatically people think country. We had a song on the TV show Nashville so automatically people think we are country. We toured with The Band Perry and wrote up song for them and so there’s an easy way people can say “well, they’re country” because of that but if you get the full band together and listen to us play live or on the record then you can’t say that it belongs to one genre. We don’t know where it goes and nobody else has a defined place for it either. It’s just our music and hopefully people keep connecting.
You can now purchase John & Jacob’s debut album from their website and check out photos from the interview on Felicity Coyle’s (photographer/co-interviewer)Instagram.
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