The pandemic has impacted every area of life, particularly for musicians, but Ian Jones was on an interesting creative path just before those events with the recording of a new album, Results Not Typical and major touring bookings. Thankfully, that’s a path he’s been able to forge ahead with, building up his band, The Living Room All-Stars, and moving towards recording a new LP. Our first taste is the EP Evergreens, and more specifically, today’s debut of the song and video for the title track “Evergreens”. While the EP, will display a number of different sonic directions, the song “Evergreens” has a past that takes Jones back to his original dichotomy of exploring the role of both his native Washington state and of California in his creative life.
Jones originally wrote the song while homesick for the friends and landscape of the Pacific Northwest, but now resettled in Washington, he makes music with a Californian studio and producer, continuing to look at the world through dual lenses to make very personal music. I spoke with Ian Jones from Washington where he’s been relishing playing small and outdoor venues to get the music flowing, but is very much looking forward to recording their new album live with his band soon and playing live shows with them this autumn.
Hannah Means-Shannon: How long have you been working with your band, The Living Room All-Stars?
Ian Jones: After we came back from California, I figured I would put together a band. In hindsight, I was just thinking as a hobbyist. I put together a group of guys who were “okay” musicians, but if you try to force something, it doesn’t work. I realized that if we didn’t play music together, these were not guys I would hang out with. What ended up happening was that when we got a house up in Seattle, I tore down my garage and I got a friend of mine who is with an acoustic design firm, to help me build a studio. I thought, “If I build it, they will come.” I knew that I would eventually have a spot that people would want to come and play in. It’s really nice and comfortable. I was trying to find people in Seattle to play with and finally I went onto Facebook and wrote about what I was looking for as a professional gig. I got some crazy responses, but I got a response from one guy who said it might be right up his alley. When he showed up, I noticed he was very young, around 23, but he had gone to Berklee [College of Music]. And when he showed up, he had also learned every song, note-for-note, off the record.
HMS: That’s awesome preparation.
IJ: He was the first person to do that. Then I started throwing curve balls at him, playing old songs, like songs by Fleetwood Mac. But he knew them all. At the end of the night, he said, “You know, I’ve got this drummer and bass player who I have been playing with since I was 13 and I think they’d be into this. Do you want me to call them?” They came over, and instantly, I noticed there was no generation gap. I’m old enough to be their dad, but all of their parents had the same upbringing that I did with my parents with hippies, people on the road, and the same music. Then we went on tour and we just crushed it. It’s been about two years. Last year we also added a piano player. I knew that would be the hardest thing, but they had a buddy who just loves it. We’ve got a bunch of shows as a full live band starting in September. We have a favorite place on Thursday nights here in Ballard (in Seattle) and that will be our first full band show.
HMS: Were you able to work together during the pandemic at all?
IJ: All these guys are professional musicians who teach music virtually, so I saw that we had an opportunity, if we were careful, to continue working. Everyone made a commitment to have a bubble together and be tested. As a band we did a bunch of recording. I did a thing called “Story and a Song” where I would go into a studio and tell a story about a song, which helped us add to social media content. Fortunately, right before the pandemic, I was able to go down to Ojia to see my dear friend and my producer, Jesse Seibenberg. We did some preproduction for the next album, and we ended up recording four or five songs.
Then after the pandemic hit, Jesse came back and said, “Those preproduction tracks are awesome. Do you want to just work with those?” So I said, “Let’s do it.” We were able to put together a couple of those songs off of that session, and then we started to build the record during the pandemic. My guitarist and I got together at Ken Stringfellow’s studio here in town and we did some of the stems for this record, which we were able to send to Jesse, and he was able to finish them. During the pandemic, we were able to put together six songs. What we’re going to do next is fly Jesse up and work at Ken Stringfellow’s studio. It’ll be the first record with me and The Living Room All-Stars and we’re going to track it live. Jesse will be able to take the stems back to Ojai and do whatever he wants to them. But we’ll have drums, bass, two guitars, piano, and vocals, all cut live. We’re really looking forward to it.
HMS: Have you been writing songs towards that?
IJ: Yes, the writing’s all done. We have 12 songs. With the EP, three or four of the six songs are brand new. But I have so many songs that have never been recorded because there was a period of time where I was not doing anything in the music industry, but I was still writing.
HMS: “Evergreens” is also a song that has a longer history for you, right?
IJ: Yes. It had been recorded once before, poorly, in my basement back when I lived in another part of Seattle. Kevin Suggs, who is an engineer and producer here in Seattle, is one of the most outstanding human beings in the city. He put pedal steel on the song and we put new vocals on it in his studio and that salvaged the terrible recording. But it hadn’t really ever been released. The song was written in DADGAD tuning. At the time I wrote it, I had come back up to the Pacific Northwest to go fishing with a friend of mine, and we were fishing in the Puget Sound, not catching anything. As it is when you fish with someone who you’ve known for a long time, you don’t really say anything. Then one of us said, “It’s nine AM.” Then a minute or two later, the other one said, “Sure don’t feel like August.” Since it was unseasonably warm. Then my buddy looked at me and said, “Hey, if that’s not the first line of a song!” I said, “Yeah, you’re right.”
Then I went home to Santa Barbara. It’s funny, you can be sitting in paradise and not necessarily be happy. I knew a lot of people, but none of them were my old-school friends. I’m blessed to have a handful of people who I can say that if we all got together from wherever we are on the planet, it would be like no time had passed. I missed those guys and I missed the seasons. Walking around in a tanktop at Christmas is weird. I missed the mountains, the Olympics and the Cascades. Being able to see Mount Rainier is something you take for granted.
I missed my friends and I realized that I was going into a lot of situations in the music industry where I really had to keep my guard up. When we finally left Santa Barbara, it had gotten to the point where it wasn’t even about music anymore. The band I was in had broken up. It was quintessential music story. Everything was close to being fantastic and everything blew up. The song “Evergreens” was about being lonely in a place where you’re still surrounded by people.
So when I did the video, we were wondering, “What’s the most lonely place you can think of?” One of the first things we came up with was being in the center of Times Square, and being totally surrounded by people, but not knowing anyone. We wanted to capture that, but of course it was impossible to film that due to the pandemic. Then we thought about a totally empty warehouse, and a friend of mine happens to work for a property management company, so he had access to a 57,000 square foot vacant warehouse. We went down, shot the video, and I used a Bluetooth speaker to play along to the song. Everything else was put together with video we took from my friend’s cabin near Mount Rainier. It’s a quintessential Northwest spot.
HMS: I got the feeling from the video that it was trying to show things as close to real life as possible with the handycam footage. Were you hoping to bring a sense of reality to confront the unreality or superficiality you were talking about before?
IJ: Yes, 100%. I always use Dave Grohl as an example and I aspire to me more like Dave Grohl. I take music very seriously and my father was an English professor and poet who published books of poetry. If there’s anything I learned from my dad, it’s “Take your craft very seriously.” Jim Messina taught me a lot about songwriting and I’ve been lucky to have some mentors. At the end of the day, what I hope people take from my music is that there’s a certain amount of integrity.
I think with the whole Northwest, when you get outside the big places like Seattle or Tacoma, you’re going to be in the country. It’s a kind of country. There are still a lot of fields. We still grow wheat, and corn, and hay. I had to hay bale growing up. It was not fun. But we would go fishing and hunting. I want to incorporate that into my music. Trying to show that real life in music is important. But at the same time, you have to have a sense of humor about it all.
HMS: Does all this connect to ideas of musical genre for you?
IJ: One of the problems with the modern music genre is the moment when someone asks, Hey, what kind of music do you play?” First of all, there are a million genres. I can’t say that I play Country, because to most people today, Country is Toby Keith and “Red Solo Cup”. I call it “hat music”. I don’t feel I fall into that category. Then there’s Americana, which is about the broadest term you can get.
HMS: I’d say “Evergreens” does fit in the Country or Americana vein whereas some of the other songs on the EP might not fit that so much.
IJ: I wish I could make this blanket statement to every songwriter in the world: “You might think you know what’s best for your songs, but let me tell you, you don’t.” It’s the hardest thing in the world to give up creative control. I learned in the past to trust someone with my music. Moving into working with Jesse, the song “Born Again Sinner” was supposed to be almost like “Runnin’ Down a Dream” by Tom Petty. It was supposed to be upbeat and fast, with a driving backbeat. But Jesse went total Bladerunner with it.
HMS: I’d say it has a strong Rock element to it. I can hear a little bit of Blues in there, but it’s definitely a Rock song now.
IJ: How Jesse got that out of the song is a mystery, but the first time the band heard this version, they said, “Sorry, but that’s way better.” Once again, Jesse was right. I’m totally cool with that. Moving into this next full-length record, we’ve already had this conversation in the band, saying, “Let’s not get these songs too set in stone because Jesse is going to come up and probably change them.”
Photo credit: Justin Dylan Renney
