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Feature: Jack Foley
"I’VE lived like a bum when I’ve had to, I’ve
dined with the richest of men. I’ve had little taste of
the action, I won’t go backwards again…"
So confesses Jason Downs, the 29-year-old singer, songwriter,
storyteller and actor, who realised, on one rainy April day in
2003, that everything had to change.
Having scored a massive hit with his single, White Boy With
A Feather (and its album of the same name), things had gone
quiet…. too quiet.
"I had to clean-house my life," he says one year later.
"In my personal life I had been non-committal, my professional
life was infuriating and unnerving. For years I’d avoided
any sort of grown up decision. That was the day I started everything
again."
The results are there for everyone to judge on Jason’s
second album, The Spin, which is released on July 12.
Fans of its predecessor, 2001’s enchanting White Boy
With A Feather, should fall, once again, for Jason’s
unique modern-day storytelling flair.
Still in place is an outlook both universal and achingly personal,
tragic while being heart-warmingly funny, but while Jason remains
unchallenged in his subtle blend of hip-hop and country, there’s
a new spin to Spin.
New and old fans alike will relish the delicious forays into
electronica and a blossoming narrative style. Songs of innocence
are now songs of experience. At the age of 30, Jason Downs is
right where he wants to be, and you’ll want to be there
too.
Jason was born in Maryland, USA. He’s part-Cherokee - Jason’s
great-great-grandmothers were among those who were driven from
their lands in the 19th century and went on to settle down with
white farmers.
He admits that he blundered through his teenage years, with ‘a
combination of innocence and ignorance; full of myself but also
full of life. I was both naïve and arrogant’.
During his Bible belt upbringing (‘naïve and arrogant
in itself’, he laughs) he fell for the performing arts.
It turned into a love affair and a fantasy.
"The only thing was, my parents were so supportive that
I didn’t have a reason to wake up from the fantasy."
Not until a slightly older Jason moved to New York, that is.
"I went out into the world and got my ass kicked in a major
way," he admits.
After the precise variety of chance encounter people move to
New York to engineer (working as a janitor in an apartment block,
Jason got talking to a florist, who’d been booked for a
party, which was being thrown by Lauryn Hill’s manager),
Jason was put in touch with seminal hip-hop stalwart, Milk D,
whose Audio 2 hit, Top Billin, had soundtracked much
of Jason’s adolescence – his old high school team
used it during warm-ups.
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Gradually, things began to take shape;
management fell into place and, finally, in 2000, he signed to
Jive.
Then things began to move quickly. By 2001 Jason was in the UK
promoting his debut single - White Boy With A Feather,
an autobiographical look at Jason’s first days in New York
- and The Face quickly dubbed Jason ‘your actual 21st Century
popstar’.
The single shot into the UK Top 20, followed by widespread critical
acclaim for the album, also called White Boy With A Feather.
Jason released a second single – a dramatic reinterpretation
of Harry Chapin’s classic, Cat’s In The Cradle
- but then things went quiet.
It had all been a steep learning curve for Jason and, at the
top of that curve, things felt rather different.
"By the end of that campaign," Jason recalls, "I’d
learned that I didn’t know jack shit and that my ignorance
and enthusiasm could do a lot of damage."
As work began on the follow-up, he began to realise the reality
of the pressures that come with delivering a second album.
In keeping with the current fickle musical trends, the album
should apparently be, so Jason was told, ‘more poppy and
more commercial, about partying, fucking the chucks and yanking
the ho's’.
With every week that ticked by, Jason began to feel that the
album was slipping away from him.
This 21st Century pop-star, whose music teemed with a unique
identity and voice, was being erased from his own record. As a
result, two years passed.
"We'd managed eight songs," Jason admits. "Just
eight songs. It was slow."
Understandably, the label intervened. Soon after that April day,
which changed his life, Jason was working with a new lease of
life, and within just three months, another eight songs had been
recorded.
The finished product is The Spin – so called,
Jason says, because ‘you can spin things any which way you
like - negatively or positively. That’s the pretentious
side of the title’.
And the non-pretentious side?
"It’s fun. It’s a party album… More or
less. It’ll be a fun spin to play at parties. Or on road
trips."
And while The Spin was taking shape, a restless Jason
found other things to occupy his mind, including indulging his
other passion: acting.
In 2003, he drew on his time at New York’s legendary NYU
Tisch School of the Arts, co-producing – and taking the
male lead in – a low-budget indie flick, called Come Lovely.
The film, which was shot in less than one month, was a partial
response to 9/11 and the helplessness of losing someone you love,
and was a finalist in the USA Film Festival.
Other things have happened to Jason, too. He got himself ordained
on the internet, so that he could marry his brother and his wife.
He’s been working with youth theatre groups. He moved out
of the city, and bought a house in the mountains.
He’s discovered sneakers. Things are good. When you hear
The Spin, you’ll know how good.
"I’ve been swimming through bullshit and my own ignorance
to get here, but I’m here," Jason smiles. "I’m
a very headstrong person. I took a lot of wrong turns to get to
the right place, but I’m here now." |
