Everyone’s favourite alt-pop maverick, JAWNY has finally dropped his debut album proper.
Words: Steven Loftin.
JAWNY’s feeling pretty good right about now. The American pop songsmith is readying his debut album ‘it’s never fair, always true’ for release, and as he bounds to life on Zoom with Dork, it’s abundantly clear that he’s one happy clam – and with good reason.
After skyrocketing to fame with his debut hit ‘Honeypie’ in 2019, life for Jacob Sullenger has been on an ever-increasing up and up. Some might call it fate. This is something he attests to, proclaiming, “I feel like I was born with [music], to be honest. All my earliest memories are just music-based and wanting to be a performer. My mom and everyone say the same thing; they’re like, it’s crazy because this is really all you literally ever wanted to do. It’s just always made sense to me.”
He’s already got a couple of titles under his belt. With his 2020 major label debut project ‘For Abby’ and 2021’s EP ‘The Story of Hugo’, he’s been carving himself a nice space nestled between indie-bopper and flourishing pop star. That’s not to mention his early days under the moniker Johnny Utah back before he upped sticks to LA from Philadelphia. But how the California native has dealt with the swift success has led to a blossoming confidence and one that’s all rooted in the reality of the situation.
“If I was a therapist, and I was picking my brain, like, it’s probably a combination of the last few years of finally finding my footing as an artist,” JAWNY reckons. “Because you work really hard to become an artist, and then once you get to a point where you have some sort of success or sign to a major, that’s where the work really starts.”
No stranger to hard work, through his handful of projects and smatterings of singles, JAWNY’s progress is deeply rooted in knowing that as each step gets closer to whatever the big picture is in his head, “you’re a smaller fish and it’s just a bigger pond. And you have to kind of keep going. I think that boggled my brain a little bit.”
When he was young, his mum would have MTV on in the background. “It’s just ingrained in my brain, and I love it,” he glows. “I can’t explain why. I don’t know what it is; I don’t know if I was dropped on my head a certain way, or something happened, or I got shook a certain way. But it’s like a little bug that I haven’t been able to shake.”
Even in his own music videos comes a throwback to the surrealist, vivid-coloured world of MTV’s mid-nineties years. But for all this focused drive comes something JAWNY refers to as “a double-edged sword” because “it’s the only thing that I’m genuinely good at in life; I’ve sucked at everything else,” he laughs. “You give me a sketchpad and tell me to doodle – I’m shit at that. You can tell me to fucking direct a music video – I’m shit at that. But, for some reason, music just has always connected for me. I don’t think it’s going anywhere anytime soon.”
It’s why in his own offerings, no matter what it’s dealing with, be it unrequited love or general shenanigans, there’s a sense of carefree fun. One that breathes throughout every hooky chorus or bop-worthy beat. Garnering his success and the gazillion streams that come alongside becoming an overnight success, what would he do if all the fans and success disappeared?
“Music is the only thing that I’m genuinely good at in life; I’ve sucked at everything else”
JAWNY
“I have those conversations with myself,” he says. “If everything went away tomorrow, would I still be doing the same thing I was doing when I was 19, where I had a job, and I was making shitty money, but I was still making and writing music because I loved it; I wasn’t even putting it out into the world. I was just doing it because I liked doing it.”
Taking it a bit further, he continues. “There’s the follow-up question of, what if you lost everything tomorrow, and there was a 100% sure thing that said you’ll never make it in music again; nothing will ever connect again. Not a single listener will ever hear it again. Would you still like to make it just for yourself? And I would. As long as I answer yes to those two questions, always, I know I’m in a good place mentally about everything.”
As with all good stories, ‘it’s never fair, always true’ began at the end. “I have to know how it ends, or I need to know what happens in the middle.” And where ‘it’s never fair’ ends up is ‘Selfish Hate’, a seven-minute number that embraces its inner emo and tussles with the breakdown of love. The tracks unleashing comes from a road travelled throughout the album surrounded by laments of, to, and for love. And this is all by design. Because for JAWNY, it’s all he knows.
“No shade to anyone else who does this, but there are a billion different ways to make an album, and they’re all great.” He doesn’t subscribe to producing a heaving stack of tracks to dwindle down to a lucky handful, or disappearing into the wilderness to return with an opus. “That’s a little harder for me to do because, as a storyteller and a songwriter, I don’t have the motivation to keep writing music if I don’t know what it’s about, right? I have to have a direction that I’m going in. I’m not the guy you bring into a room like Ryan Tedder, who can just write a hit off of nothing. I can do that at times, but I really do need to have a direction I’m going. Anything I write, as far as a bigger piece of music or project – they’re not necessarily concept pieces, but there’s always a through-line narrative. There’s always like a start to finish.”
‘It’s never fair’ follows this same pattern. He does admit that there has been some growth, though. “The biggest difference between those two [projects] is maturity and song maturity, and making things bigger and better and more complex.” This is what makes ‘it’s never fair’ his first album proper, as opposed to another mixtape. There are no skits or loosely tying bits together. This is a fully bonafide album. Featuring the smash singles ‘strawberry chainsaw’, and ‘take it back’ featuring Beck, the entire tale is soundtracked by bright sounds that, even in their darkest moments, leave a little light on.
And for someone who’s such a self-professed storyteller, being in LA, a city notorious for its characters and hallowed streets, must surely offer up a wealth of inspiration? “Yeah, if you go outside, it probably is!” He cackles. “I’m kind of in my house all the time.”
Coming into his career in those locked-down years means JAWNY’s perspective on his journey is a little different, particularly to those who cut their teeth by playing show after show. The feeling of discovering the humanity behind those incalculable streaming digits is one of the things that was missing initially. More specifically, the fact that even the songs with lesser numbers – a perishable thought in the online game – made an impact. “Before I started touring actively, I used to base if something streamed well as the sole proprietor whether a song connected with people and that would crush my mentality on if I was a good songwriter,” he admits. “And it wasn’t until I went on my headline tour after COVID – because we spent all those years inside, right, and I was still putting out music inside – but I couldn’t tour anything. So I would see that songs that may have not done well in the streaming era of things, a whole roomful of people is still singing it, and they were connected to it, and they still love that song.”
Grappling with his success is what, strangely enough, has led to even more of the gold dust. Admitting where years ago he was “trying to be cool, or trying to make music like other people were making, because I didn’t think mine would ever be successful,” the truth of the matter is that “you can’t escape who you are.”
“Even if you try to be somebody else and packaged differently, the real you is gonna always shine through, so you might as well just lean into it,” he smiles.
“I think that’s why my music always has that weird rub, or shine to it that people associate with me because I can’t really escape that. I can’t make a Phoebe Bridgers record; like, would it be cool? Maybe,” he continues, “but I can’t make a record like Bon Iver because if I tried to, it wouldn’t sound cool. A little tongue-in-cheek-ness would probably shine through. I can only make JAWNY music. I learned to accept that a lot more in the last three or four years, and I stopped running away from it.” ■
Taken from the April 2023 edition of Dork. JAWNY’s debut album ‘it’s never fair, always true’ is out now.
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