Det blev ett kort samtal med Rival Sons frontman Jay på Sweden Rock Festival, en man som lever för musiken och som tidigt kände att det inte fanns något annat i livet som var viktigare:
– Singing was something that brought me a lot of joy and I was very young when I knew that that´s what I wanted to do with my life. The idea of not playing music and not singing, it sounded like jail. Like, I might as well join the army or go to jail if I can´t play music.
That´s a most impressive beard you´ve got there. I wish I could grow something like that.
Oh, thanks man! It´s just called laziness. Razors are expensive, man hahaha!
When was the first time you discovered that you could carry a tune? Was it really early on?
Yeah, I think that music was… I mean, I´m very thankful to be able to say this, but for me when I was a little kid, I thought everyone played music. I thought everybody… I thought everyone was a musician. My parents were musicians. My pop would play guitar and he´s sing and my mother would sing. I thought everyone played music and all of their friends played music. They´d have jam sessions at the house and parties or parties at their friends´ houses and jam sessions. Music was just something that sounded and felt really natural and it really spoke to me in a very important way, but when you´re really young, everything does. Everything speaks to you in a certain way and there are things you understand and things that you don´t that aren´t as familiar, but music and melody and all of those things were just part of all of it. Singing was something I used to do whenever I was just playing or making up songs, but I think all kids do that, but I just never stopped. Singing was something that brought me a lot of joy and I was very young when I knew that that´s what I wanted to do with my life. The idea of not playing music and not singing, it sounded like jail. Like, I might as well join the army or go to jail if I can´t play music. It was pretty early on and then when I got really serious about it, when I was a young teenager and started writing songs and all of that stuff it was still… what your voice means to you and your vocal abilities change… they change all throughout your life and your perspective on what the art is changes, but it´s always there. We change so we´re always morphing into new a new iteration of ourselves. I´m still dumbfounded. For me, music and melody and everything, I´ve never gotten jaded and I´m still very passionate. Me and music, our sex life is still red hot, hahaha! I´m still very much in love because music or song writing, any of these things, it´s still such a fucking mystery to me. I´ve been doing it all my life, but I´m not sure I understand anything. I understand my experience, but when it comes to the power of creation or inspiration, it just comes when it comes. It comes like a lightning bolt, but I can´t summon it. I can´t command it to come to me or do my bidding. It´s either it´s there of it´s not and I think for that reason it´s still remains very elusive and any small command I can have over my abilities or whatever, I´m very thankful for.
When you were younger and discovering your voice and getting up on stage, was there like one frontman or a singer that you kind of looked to as “that´s a really cool guy and he´s got some cool moves”?
I think it just has to do with different stages in your life. I remember being a young teenager and hearing The Animals and seeing some footage of Eric Burdon with his deep baritone. Seeing that and going “Who´s that little guy? He´s cool as fuck!” Seeing that and then of course seeing Prince. Then there was the blues and all of that, but once I really understood rock music… I mean, growing up in the 80´s and I´m probably going to make some enemies here, but most of the 80´s… I better shut up, hahaha! I better be quiet. I just personally didn´t relate with the rock that was going on when I was a kid. I didn´t relate with it, because I was raised on the blues and there wasn´t a lot of blues going on there. You´d hear blues licks, but it wasn´t predicated and it had gotten far away from the source. Everbody loves the Rolling Stones and I was listening to that, “Alright, that´s good!”, but then hearing Led Zeppelin was like “Oh shit!” and listening to that band and go “Oh wow!” Someone emulating all of these people like Otis Redding, Stevie Wonder and for me that was what it´s all about. I always loved the entertainers that were self-indulgent. Van Morrison, entirely self-important and self-indulgent in a beautiful way. Joni Mitchell, Nina Simone… the only thing that existed was her and that song and you got that sense from her life, so for me, taking a page out of the book of my heroes, is that I´ve just always sought to completely surrender to the song. Just the song and what I´m there to do, that´s the only thing that exists. Every song every time we play a show, I just treat it like it can be my last time on stage, because you never know what going to happen. I don´t take it for granted.
Text: Niclas Müller-Hansen
Foto: Björn Olsson