The Jump Journal

I’m thinking that this might be my last post here on Tumblr. I’m not antiTumblr, necessarily…it was a necessity in 2015 to get up and going as quickly as possible. But it has always felt clunky and now that we have other options: our official page, Medium, Patreon…it’s time to consolidate, I think. I feel like this blog has kind of been out in the wilderness a little and maybe it’s time to give it a better home.

Speaking of Patreon, our page launched last Thursday, and while I was very much looking forward to it, I can’t lie: I lost a number of nights of sleep over it. Why?

It’s the oldest way for artists to exist: through the patronage of people that want to support the artists in making new art. This practice allowed tons of artists do what they did for centuries, and happily. But this practice hasn’t really been a part of the modern world until “crowdfunding” became legal. Even then, it is one thing to ask people to help you pay for one thing. It’s another to ask for people to give part of their monthly income to you, not knowing about the thing, but hoping that a thing happens. So, anxiety.

It is thrilling and feels icky at the same time, to ask for people to be your patrons. On the one hand, why shouldn’t you ask? I want to create things, as an artist. I want to create things for a living, as an artist. Why would those two statements need to be separate thoughts?

I was actually taught that they were separate thoughts. If you are a son of two artists, you learn that money isn’t something that is easy to come by. You go to art school, you are encouraged to wear the “starving artist” badge on your sleeve proudly. Artists are special. They are different. Artists are poor.

Again, why? I don’t know. If you’ve never tried to make a living being a full-time artist, you might don’t know this. It’s hard. When I make money as a web developer, it sometimes makes me angry. Why do I make so much more money building a website for a marketing firm, or an app for a company that sells stocks? These jobs aren’t nearly as difficult or interesting to me as writing a song or acting in a play, but they are far more highly valued by society.

I like writing code. I like getting paid to do so. But I don’t like it as much as being on stage. I can (more easily) support my family writing code, and live a comfortable life, but if that’s all I do, I feel unfulfilled. I could build websites by day and act in plays at night, but that is sort of a drag for me because then I’m in two full-time day jobs and am always sort of strung out and exhausted and can’t give my best to any work I do.

This is just me, by the way. I’m just speaking about my experience as an artist. My fellow developers are very fulfilled being full-time coders. Tons of actors here in Chicago love to have day jobs for money and then put on their “Artist Caps” at night. They have the drive and energy to do that. I am not knocking their choices. I’m just a better person, a better artist, when I am single-tasking: getting paid to do one, fulfilling, creative job.

Jump, Little Children never got “famous”. We were successful for a rock band in that we could hit the road and have between 50 and 5000 people come see us when we played, depending on the location. In some cities we were almost a household name and in others very few people had heard of us. We weren’t as business-savvy and easy to swallow as Guster and we weren’t a sexy two-person band like Shovels and Rope. We just didn’t catch on enough, and there is no big clear reason why. We cannot really blame bad management and record label issues. The truth is that tons of amazing bands don’t catch on, don’t make it to Conan, but love writing and playing and do it for as long as they can financially and emotionally stay afloat. It doesn’t matter “why”. We gave it our all, made some good decisions and some bad ones, and were proud that it was our full-time job for as long as it was.

Of course, by “full-time job” standards, we were way below the poverty level our entire career. It’s expensive to run a business, and Jump was our sexy business, which meant that if there was anyone that was going to get a pay cut when times were tough, it wouldn’t be our manager, tour manager, lawyer, or sound guy. Just us. You keep going in the hopes that you’ll eventually be the ones making the most money; that didn’t happen for us and I have no regrets.

It was amazing to finally get paid a living wage when the band was done in 2005. The first time I made a weekly paycheck I couldn’t believe it. Making $30k a year for the first time was like being fabulously wealthy…and this was in my very late 30s. Being comfortable was intoxicating for a while, but not being a creative person for a living kind of left me with a empty feeling in my chest. My journal entries pre-2015 had a theme: ask after ask for the Universe to bring me something that would both be a fulfilling career and support my family at the same time.

Yet when the Universe brought the Jump reunion in 2015 to me, I was the last person in the band that said “yes”. I assumed that the chapter was closed and I was fine with it. The five of us weren’t that close at the time and I had forgotten what it was like to play music with people that knew you as well as Jay, Johnny, Ward and Evan knew me. I knew that saying “yes” was going to open up a lot of baggage that had been packed away, would be a ton of extra work for me personally, was going to be scary and emotional and possibly a big fucking failure.

It has been some of those things, too. But as you’ve gathered from this blog, it has also been incredible–a great creative lump of plaster putty to fill in my unfulfilled chest hole (gross!). Worth the being away from home, worth the pay cuts again, worth the anxieties and fears and insecurities. Lots and lots of sleepless nights. Worth it.

I’m luckier than the members of the band that don’t live on Facebook and Instagram, I’m luckier than those that don’t stay in the lobbies of rock clubs after every show until the venue kicks us all out. I’m luckier, because I can see the direct impact our saying “yes” to JLC in 2015 made on your lives and therefore on my life. You’re very honest about it, and I don’t take it lightly. The music has gotten you through bad times and good and happy moments and sad. The community has not just been a place to put your love of a rock band, but also a place to put your own dreams and hopes and needs. Every band might be required to say “we couldn’t do it without our fans” but I know more than anyone how true that statement is for Jump. I’m lucky.

So, Patreon.

Man, it is hard. I get it. For those of you that are a little taken aback at our choice to try this out in order to keep our creative little rock and roll world afloat, I feel you. Everyone is asking for your money these days. How can people that don’t have 9 to 5 jobs ask you to help pay for their lifestyle? Especially if you like your 9 to 5 job? I do not have an answer, because it feels a little icky and uncomfortable to me, too.

Cards on table: Jump, Little Children has two options in 2019. We can’t afford to do what we did last year and not get paid for the intense amount of work it takes to be a mostly-full-time band: writing, recording, touring, posting, streaming, marketing. We either try this Patreon thing out, or something like it, to see if it will help us be able to spend more time writing music and creating things, or we spend less time on the band and do more lucrative things to keep food on tables. Realistically, we will still have to do other things anyway, but anything helps. The days (and chances) of a big record label swooping in and paying us to write and record songs are over, and even when our big record label did swoop in, we didn’t get a pay raise anyway.

Friday morning I woke up with an idea to record some Irish music with my friend Amanda Kapousouz in time for St. Pat’s. And I felt a freedom to have that thought that I didn’t have before. Sure, I might have done the recording anyway, but knowing that I could at some point make a creative work like that happen and get paid for it was inspiring. I’ve just spent three hours writing this letter to you. Connecting with you has always been my job and always will be, whether I get paid for it or not, but it does take time, time that I could spend coding, I suppose. I’d rather write these love letters to you.

Patronage isn’t about putting a price on your love. We are putting a price on the pride we take in our work, the time we take to agonize over details, the care we put into everything from a melody, to a sentence, a pixel, a shade of hair dye. It’s not your responsibility to feed us. It’s our responsibility to find the means to feed ourselves. We would like to do that by writing songs and producing new content, and we are attempting to find new and creative ways to do so.

It could be a winning solution for everyone. If this works out for us, the goal is to keep writing music and performing. With something like Patreon, we could possibly have a new album next year. Without it, we might have a new album in 2022. That’s not a huge difference. Either way, it’s OK, right?

Support us on Patreon if you can, but if you cannot: please don’t. Please please don’t. If you like this idea and want to support us, but can’t afford to, let us know how we might help you make that work. Is it to change the tier prices? To put more stuff in the lower tiers? What would make it worth it? We need to have all the data at hand.

And if you can’t, please accept that we are still going to be around and not play games with your hearts? We’ll post to the same social media and do the same silly LIVE chats and tour and hopefully write new music. We are here, we love you just as much, so you can let other people pay while you reap the benefits, OK?

Whew. I feel better getting this off my chest…thank you. I’m gonna go record some flute, now, for fun…and profit?

We love you,

It's hard to believe that it was just a week ago that we were playing with our newly-named New Oblivion Orchestra. That was a week ago? That was a week ago. And exactly one year ago that Vance the Manager sat us down with the plan for funding, writing, recording, releasing, and touring a new album. ONE YEAR AGO. Thank you for making this entire year one of the most fun we have ever, ever had. 

The day after our last show of the year we had a photo shoot with our friend and photographer Nathan Baerreis, and from the looks of the early shots, it's going to be a good one.

"Why would you have another photo shoot?", you ask, "Isn't Sparrow done, already?" What is left to do?

A lot. Four months isn't a ton of time for an album to be out. There are still so many people–so many fans of Jump, Little Children, even–that don't know about the album, or that we are writing new music. While it might be easier to get the word out thanks to various social media in some ways, in many ways it's just as hard as ever to introduce people to new music, because there is so much noise out there, literally and figuratively. It'll be tough for us, too, because we know that we're not going to be a full-time touring band again. We love our home lives: we like making our own coffee in the morning. We also like getting on a bus, playing shows, saying "hello", but I don't think we'll ever get back to the point where we are touring most of the year. It's a choice that we're happy with.

So how do we a) increase our "noise" both online and elsewhere without physically touring and b) try to support all of this work that we need to do to make it happen?

We have a few ideas, and many of them we discovered by accident. My brother Evan and I started doing Facebook and Instagram Live streams because we had things to announce that were band-related. They were awkward, at first, then awkward AND fun. Soon we were talking about things that were unrelated to Jump, Little Children because we enjoy talking to each other and have lots of things to talk about. The experience was made even better by you, chiming in in the comments. The Bivins Brothers Show (name pending) was born. Coming soon to a Facebook & Instagram Live and YouTube Channel near you. We're working on a few ideas of what the focus of the show will be, but no matter what we feel like it's an excellent way for us to all stay in touch.

After our first performance of Sparrow at the Footlights Players Theatre last year, we did an extremely fun "Q & A" that gave you the opportunity to ask questions about the album, and about us as a band. It got Jay thinking about how fun it would be to break down the entire album, song by song. For those of you familiar with the podcast "Song Exploder", that's what we'll be going for. Jay Clifford, a remarkably entertaining podcast host, will single out accordion tracks from "White Buffalo", interview Johnny Gray about how many basses he used in the song "Voyeuropa", and learn from producer Josh Kaler how much reverb went into the harmonica in "Cyclorama". It's going to be a high-quality and very interesting dive into our new album, and how the writing/recording process really goes, for those of you that don't know!

But there's more.

We kept a secret from many of you this year, and it's time for us to fess up. On December 29th we performed a very special show at the Queen Street Theatre in Charleston where we played the entirety of The Licorice Tea Demos and Magazine, back-to-back. Yes, we played "Opium" for the first time in probably 20 years, and "Dark and Lonely Man" for the first time in a loooooooong time. We only announced this show to our Facebook Group called Opium, a 1000-strong group of folk that has been a part of the official J, LC "fan club" for a while. 200 tickets sold in about three minutes. Many people on Opium didn't get to go, and there were plenty of you out there that didn't know about the show at all. We called it "#licmag". It was f'ing magical.

The Opium Group is open to anyone. It's a private on Facebook, but any fan of the band can apply, and you should: (https://www.facebook.com/groups/1621541794731647/). In Opium you'll often get first dibs on any ticket sales, special questions from Vance the Manager about merch and the like, even more interaction with the band, etc. This year, Opiates got a chance to come to see us play very old songs that you haven't heard in years. It's a very supportive group and we appreciate it so much. 

What if there was an "Opium+"? An "Opium Pro"? "Opium XS"? An "Underground Elite"?? What if we could build a place where JLC fans that want to support the band financially, to support this community, to share information and talk about live taping and in return for their support get special tickets and original content created by the five of us?

"Underground Elite 2.0" (name pending) will be built at patreon.com. We love Patreon's very-old-school concept of having Patrons support Artists directly. Old school like "The Renaissance". It has a ton of tools that we can use to be closer to those that want to help us stay a rock band, to help us write more albums, to help us just create. I personally support a number of Patreon accounts, just a dollar or ten a month, and I love the feeling it brings to be able to allow another artist the means to continue to do more of what they're doing, to feel like I'm helping them not have to find money doing something that would in any way keep them from being great podcasters, singer-songwriters, or comic book writers. 

Patreon lets you support an artist monthly or based on what they create. Either way helps. And we're ready to exchange this patronage with content. Besides Jay's yet-unnamed-podcast, our Patreon channel will be a home for special episodes of the Bivins Brothers Broadcast (name pending). We'll share newly written demos, and songs that "didn't make the cut" to be on Sparrow. Exclusive merchandise designed by Evan and some of our favorite designers. I’d actually love to write out some more lyric prints (or phrases?) for those that would like them. Would it be fun for Ward Williams to teach guitar and cello lessons, or Jonathan Gray perform "80's Mall Organ Store" renditions of songs on my Fun Machine? You're damned right it would be fun. Official Archivist Chris Slack is willing to share never-before-released Jump shows he has on file. Remember the "secret show" I mentioned above? #licmag? Chris recorded it, and as a Patreon subscriber, you'll get to hear it, and also our night with our incredible New Oblivion Orchestra.

And we'll be talking tickets. Early-Access tickets to shows that non-subscribers know about, and probably some that they don't. Tickets, podcasts, videos, merch, and a lot more. We're still dreaming stuff up.

We've always been a band that is very open to our fans. We try to write back when you email, answer when you call. I have (very recently) stood in line with a blazing fever after a show because I genuinely wanted to talk to each and every person that came to see us play. We don't have to; there are lots of bands that don't care about that stuff. To me, it's part of it, maybe the biggest part of it. The problem is that we're not going to be touring 250 days a year like we used to, and that could seriously limit our interactions. But if we can create a place where we're sharing stuff that we create, you're helping us create stuff, we throw in a decent forum platform, and Boom. We will get even more of this lovely community and communication, is my hope. We'll just more of these moments in our PJs on the Laz-E-Boy on our computers instead of at the end of a long night at a rock and roll club. 

Last year we hit January with a very clear plan for the entire year: fund the creation of an album of new songs, write songs in 3 months, record those songs in 2 months, release said album, tour that album for about a month, end the year with an orchestra. We pulled it off and learned a lot. We learned that we like having goals and we like creating and writing songs. Evan and I like recording ourselves talking about superheroes and intense diets, and yes, Jump, Little Children. Jay loves to talk about the songs he has written. There were some growing pains, but we feel ready. We want a plan for this year, and next year, too. Part of that will include more touring, and part of that will likely include a new album down the line. Sparrow has just dropped, though, and there is a ton to still say, a ton of people that need to find us. We think that Patreon will help with that. 

I love holiday music. Specifically Christmas music, even though I know it’s not politically correct to say. But by saying this I’m not trying to be exclusive; I didn’t grow up in a religious environment. To me, Halloween is about dressing up, Thanksgiving is about food, and December is about Christmas songs. I think that most of my piano training came from learning carols on my upright piano in our dining room. Everyone is allowed to sing Christmas carols, whether they celebrate the holiday or not. It’s the sense of community that’s the important part, the hope that people are thinking about you as you think of them, and the hope that things can be peaceful and happy and calm and wonderful. For the past four years straight in Chicago I’ve been a part of a caroling group that randomly shows up at parties and theater lobbies and sings for fun. It’s one of my favorite nights of the year. Jump, Little Children only recorded one Christmas track, during the Buzz era of our careers, and it was a really fun time. I wrote lyrics especially for our cover of “You’re All I Want for Christmas”…they were about wanting to make out, of course.

Spotify won’t let us share that single with you, but I can list some of my (and Evan’s, and Johnny’s) favorite songs of the holiday. We tried to pick some that you might not know. We hope you like! 

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6bKQGQ3CQWhUL9SD9wtBfW

God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen by Annie Lennox: this entire album, “A Christmas Cornucopia”, has been my favorite Xmas album for the past few years. Annie sings the living hell out of every song, super intensely, and sometimes in French.

Ho Ho Ho by Sia: this came out last year. I love Sia. I love her melodies and her lyrics and her absolutely amazing ability to be a musical businessperson. There are lots of great songs on this album, this is one of my favorites, but there is also one called “Puppies are Forever” so she wins. Her voice is SO WEIRD on this album. I love it.

Father Christmas by the Kinks: I sang this last year with my friends Erik and Jessie in Chicago. It’s kind of hard to sing. I was stunned to find that members of the band I was singing with didn’t know it, so I’m including it here in case you haven’t heard it.

Jingle Bells/Il Eat Ne Le by the Swingle Singers: our dad loved the Swingle Singers, a group started in the 60s that kind of scats classical music and other songs. This drives some people nuts but I adore it. 

Little Drummer Boy by the Dandy Warhols: Little known fact: The Dandies are one of my favorite bands. I can’t explain why. I even loved the movie that made them look like assholes. When this song kicks in I become high.

Winter Weather by Squirrel Nut Zippers: Evan chose this one. It’s from one of his favorite holiday albums. 

Thank God it’s Christmas by Queen: Every member of JLC loves Queen. We disagree about a lot of bands, but not Queen. 

Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming by John Fahey: this one is from Jonathan. It’s his family’s holiday background music soundtrack…I started this track and he said: “that sounds like Christmas, to me!”. I had never heard of John Fahey, but “Lo How a Rose” is one of my favorite carols. 

Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want to Fight Tonight) by the Ramones: it’s the Ramones. They started American punk music. They sang a Christmas song. It’s great.

Hark! The Herald Angels Sing by Bad Religion: it’s a punk rock twofer! Bad Religion is amazing by being both melodic and punk at the same time. It’s a fine line. 

Christmas in Hollis by Run D.M.C.: my deaf wife can rap along with this entire song, and she loves to do so, even in the middle of summer. I’m normally very anti-Christmas music outside of December, but shit, man…what kind of miserable asshole tells a deaf person to stop singing?

Rock’n’Roll Santa by Jan Terri: this one is difficult to explain. Treat yourself and Google “Jan Terri” right now and enter the rabbit hole; we’ll see you in a few hours.

Chorale from the Christmas Oratorio by J. S. Bach: another Bivins Brothers holiday necessity from Dad. Dad loved bebop, Irish music, baroque music, and Jump, Little Children (luckily). 

Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis by Tom Waits: from Johnny, naturally. It was Tom’s birthday last week, and he’s 69. He’s finally growing into the age that he’s been living for decades. 

White Christmas by Esquivel: for your Space Age Bachelor Pad Christmas Party.

Christmas Time (Don’t Let the Bells End) by The Darkness: friends like Ward Williams keeps his glam metal close to him at all times, and especially at Christmas. 

This was a month that felt like four months. I don’t mean that in a bad way. I mean that in the amazing way that doing all sorts of brand-new things and being very much in the moment seems to slow down time. There are articles written about this phenomena, actually: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-empowerment-diary/201705/how-slow-down-time. According to this article, the reason September went by so freaking meaningfully is that we were bombarding ourselves with Firsts. First big tour in support of Sparrow. First time in a long time heading back to the Northeast and Midwest. First time I had to add an actual keyboard to the list of instruments I bring on stage, and within that one instrument there were dozens of sounds I had to reproduce. Etcetera, etcetera.

We worked hard. I don’t know if it’s readily ascertainable that being in a rock and roll band is tons of work by looking at one. It’s fun work, usually, but has its moments of being very intense. Especially when a new album comes out. There is radio to do in the mornings, interviews scattered during the day, loading in and out of venues, and we added soundcheck meet & greets that meant that once we arrived in a city, we were going to be working from then until show, basically.

It’s so fulfilling, though. I am the kind of person that works hard, all the time. I push and push myself (sometimes for no seeming reason), and am frustrated and disappointed with myself when I don’t get enough done. I would be classified as a “type-A” person, and I don’t mind. But sometimes I’m just working on “things” that I’m not as passionate about. An eight hour day of working on something I’m not emotionally connected to is much more tiring than working sixteen hours a day on something I believe in and care about. Being in JLC is that kind of job.

We needed every second that we had to put this tour together. These new songs are hardto play. There is so much going on in each and every song on Sparrow. Not necessarily more than on earlier recordings, but keep in mind that we never had to re-learn songs after other albums; we had been playing them live forever before we got to the studio and didn’t change them much after. There has always been a “live version” and a “studio version” of early Jump songs.

Not this time. Jay spent a crazy amount of time accessing the original recording files and turning his voice and Ward’s cello parts into samples that I could play on the keytar. While Evan didn’t really want to play to tracks, he add some electronic drums to his repertoire to approximate some of the parts live. Ward brought two guitars on tour for the first time, and Johnny played not only electric bass but a beloved new Moog Phatty. It was complicated, felt a little bit fragile, at first, but once we got the hang of things it was fun.

Hurricane Florence, while not visiting Charleston, still brought chaos to the city. There was anxiety felt wondering whether we’d be hit and how that would affect our practice. Shops and roads started closing down and we made a move so the entire band could be close by in case of flooding. In the end we were very very lucky, but there were still repercussions for us. We were trying to fulfill our PledgeMusic items, to get them sent out before tour, but this didn’t happen because mail basically shut down in NC, SC, and GA. This put us a full week behind, and we spent the rest of the month trying to catch up on many things.

Even in the last few days of rehearsal we were all feeling a bit overwhelmed. We camped out at the Footlight Player’s Theatre and the goal was to have a “listening party”, a final rehearsal before we hit the road, and that night, to be honest, I was not ready. Lyrics weren’t memorized and I had to think way too much about parts and how to play them. We were being hard on ourselves, though, and the response was so encouraging afterwards I didn’t mind spending the rest of that week’s dinner breaks to get in some extra practice so that the songs could feel comfortable.

Once the shows began, a quick weekend to some of our favorites: Charlotte, Atlanta, Columbia, where we were starting to find our groove. Raleigh, though, and the Lincoln Theatre, was a special surprise. It was Sunday, we hadn’t had a day off in three weeks, we were exhausted. It wasn’t the largest crowd we’ve played to, but that show was so much fun. People there were there to have a good time, and it put us into overdrive. Thank you so much, Raleigh.

The next leg was in the Northeast (and DC, where I insulted many a mid-Atlantic inhabitant). We hadn’t been there in fifteen years, but every show was sold out or nearly so, and that made us feel so great. These shows were our first of the City Winery gigs, and they were good to us. Great sound, great food. There were many highlights, for me, up North. We had a duo of ASL interpreters in DC that had mad sign-singing skills, and were more fun to watch than we were. Our show at Le Poisson Rouge made us feel so sexy to sell out such a great place in the Big Apple. Performance-wise, the NYC show was my favorite performance-wise; I felt really “on” that night. The super-intimate punk-rock feel of Union Pool in Brooklyn was refreshing after the lovely but slightly clinical City Wineries. We had to put Wardie in a corner to fit on stage, and many Dirty Dancing jokes were necessary. Our old pal the Mommyheads came to play with us, and they were as good as they were 20 years ago. Lots of our fans came just to see them that night and I didn’t mind at all. We had a lovely evening off with three people that pledged for the album and got to go to a Dr. Who-themed bar with us. The trio couldn’t have been more interesting and fun to hang out with: the professional bassoonist, the research monitor, and the Facebook developer. Loved that evening, and Ward got to show off his hipster Brooklyn knowledge by taking us to great places for dinner and dessert.

And Chicago! My kind of town. Chicago was a big deal for me personally, because I knew that the audience was going to be made up of a lot of friends and family that had never seen the band before, never seen me in that light, literally. I was a little nervous about that show, and I rarely get nervous. I also wanted very much for Chicago to be the show that was 100% accessible to the d/Deaf and hard of hearing. City Winery worked so hard with me to provide CART real-time captioning for all the goofy stuff we said in-between songs. And the captioning of the lyrics was provided by my other passion job, CaptionPoint, built by my wife Lindsay and run by my dear friend Lora. It was even more successful than I had hoped, the captions looked great on both sides of the stage. It was the first time Lindsay had ever been able to fully experience a JLC show; I am sure that our stage patter was absolutely worth the wait.

Wow. As I’m writing this I realize again how relatively short the tour was: after Chicago there were only three more dates. But it felt like we did so much. We saw so many of you, talked to everyone as long as we could and took pictures. The “soundcheck parties” were so fun for us. Seeing everyone again was energizing, to me. I wished at times that I could have spent more time. You said such wonderful, heartfelt things, things that I heard very clearly and appreciated completely. I am honored that this band and music and community has meant so much to you over the years; you mean everything to us. When people told me that they liked Sparrow I knew they were telling the truth and not just making conversation. Nothing could have made us happier. Like I said: fulfilling.

Athens was a highlight: we hadn’t seen the GA Theatre since it burned in 2009. The renovation was beautiful. They managed to keep the vibe of the place while making it all so much…better. But the fans in Athens have always been a special breed and we could have played on the streets if that was the only way to get to them. In the new GA Theatre we didn’t have to.

And finally, the Charleston Music Hall. Our new home. Our new “Dock Street”, a place that just makes us feel like the chamber-pop stars we are. We will see you soon, CMH.

This post is a marathon. If you’ve gotten this far, you must be a fan of the band, so I appreciate it. I want to thank many people for making this tour and this year possible, because…contrary to pop belief, we are not a famous rock band with loads of cash and there were many many donated hours that made this tour work.

Our manager Vance’s sidekicks on the Crew were Nick Stewart, the Ultimate Intern, hazed by his boss into oblivion and seemed to love every minute. He sold you tee shirts this time, but he’s going to be running something big someday. Herbie Jeffcoat, monitors and front-of-house, the sweetest “country boy” (his words, but also true) you could want on your team. Especially funny this time was hearing Herbie converse in his potent Southern accent with the FOH in Boston with a potent accent of his own. Translators were required.

Mike Rogers: what a treat it is to have gotten to know you both as a professional sound engineer and family member. I think that if Dad and your Mom had a reason to work with each other growing up like Evan and I have with you, our families would be closer than they are. Let’s keep working at it.

Alison Kendrick! The person that would be sooo bad at being a ninja because she simply wouldn’t be able to be quiet because life is just SO MUCH FUN and worth every giggle: thank you. Teasing aside, Alison is a complete and utter professional, a doer but more importantly a Problem Solver, and I truly would not have been able to do all the things internet-related without you. Thank you for being a mentor and a real friend. If you’d like to work with Alison yourself, please go to akshouts.com

Our uncomfortably attractive lawyer Gabe Fleet is genuinely fun to hang out with, giving attorneys a good name. Old pal Josh Terry and his amazing team in Maddison and Jen at Workshop Management opened doors that are closed to most people so thank you for helping us walk through them. New friends Sue, Lindsay and Tyler at Stunt Company put us in front of the movers and shakers and some (NPR, Paste, American Songwriter) actually liked what they heard.

Chris Slack, you hold all the archival keys to our kingdom and are dear to us for much more than that. Nate Baerreis and Ed and Val Schooling Brantley made us look so cool, so often. How, we will never know. Thank you.

Thanks to our families who let us be gone as much as we have been, this year. Some of you haven’t experienced not having us around, and I know it was hard, but thank you for being so supportive. We love you.

And Chief “Not-Getting-Paid-What-He’s-Worth” is Vance McNabb, who is still working on this tour two weeks later and won’t be done for a while. There are no ways to thank you, V, except perhaps to find a way to make Sparrow huge so you can get a massive raise and hire tons of people to help you. So, we’ll work on that.

Long story short: I do not remember recording an album to be this much fun.

I remember recording time to be a fairly stressful, overly emotional experience. You're placing a ton of focus on how you play, how you sound when you sing, the parts you have worked on, lyrics that you have chosen. You second-guess yourself. You feel like a fraud: "I'm not really a musician, am I? Certainly not as good as _______!". You are sure that the producer is disappointed in what you are doing. Sometimes that producer is unpleasant, too: a clown, or an asshole.

And that was the normal process, for me. Back then.

Not now. We are all different. Most of us are better musicians. Those that are not–just me, honestly, and that's OK, because I've been doing different kinds of art in the last decade that have made me a better artist–are generally more confident in speaking their mind, and feeling valid thoughts. I may not have become a better musician like Wardie, Johnny, Jay or Evan, but I'm a smarter musician, at least.

The producer(s) are friends, and fans of the band. They're looking out for us. They want this to succeed. They are inspired. Hilarious. They're working for less (sorry, guys!) so that we can get more done. And I hope that we can in some way repay them at some point.

Team Josh Kaler and Owen Biddle are the two guys that have the most stake in the process. We recorded nine songs with Kaler and Owen, one more than we had actually planned on, and man. These guys are going to be big names in this industry. They love music. They love songs. They love bands. They love us, and best of all didn't allow that love to blind them to the greater purpose of creating the Best Possible Arrangement for each song.

Another difference between Now and Then: the band didn't know these songs before we got into the studio. We hadn't been playing them live for weeks or months before recording them. We didn't have muscle memory in fingers set, we hadn't become attached to this lyric or that, this verse or that chorus. These songs were raw possibilities; very fleshed out raw possibilities because Jay is a producer in his own right, but we were able to see the demos as clay, still moldable. And nearly every song changed a little bit. Even more impressively, Jay was willing to see them as clay. He tried to be the perfect artist in the situation, open to any suggestions, wanting to make the songs as tight and clear as possible. There were some elements that he fought for, of course; these were his babies and it's always hard to talk about changing them. But he did good.

Each morning we'd take a song and just learn it. And choose the instruments that best suited the song. Which kick drum did the song need? Was it an upright bass song, or electric, or Moog Lil Phatty? Accordion, Fun Machine, electric mandolin, harmonica, cello, electric guitar? Then we'd have at it, moving/adding/adjusting choruses and verses and bridges until the thing felt right, felt the most "Jump, Little Children". The goal this time was to get the structure for each song, and the bass and drum parts. Vocals and other instruments will be added next month, but it was key to have the foundation, this time.

Our official visual documentarian and best friend Nathan Baerreis (http://nathanbaerreis.com)was there for large chunk of the first week. He captured some amazing footage and stills of candid recording moments. He'll be back for the next leg, so you'll be seeing his fantastic work a lot in the upcoming months on Instagram and Facebook and the like.

On the last day we were ahead of schedule, so Kaler had us put together an extra song, which I'm very happy about because I think that it might be my favorite so far. Here's a list of song names that may or may not be real:

Cyclorama

Voy Europa

Euphoria Designed

Je Suis Oblivion

Chances to Be This

Killing Juliet

Caring Lost

Boom Boom Goes the Country

Sparrow

Violets

Body Parts Two, Electric Boogaloo

Lackluster Dreams of a New Tomorrow

Eater of the Free World

Daisies

Watchful Eye

Hand on My Heartache

Reality Distortion Field

The Cardinal

That's fun, right? In this list are some pop songs in the vein of Come Out Clean, some esoteric songs more like Mother's Eyes, a couple of Jay/Matt collaborations, sweet and satisfying ones like Mexico. It's not a "retro" album…you're not going to get a remake of a sound from our past. There are new sounds, new instruments, new feelings along with the some familiar. But it's a Jump, Little Children album, without question. We knew that we had found the right arrangement and feel when Kaler would say "I love this band!" after a take.

Other current "Kaler-isms":

• when something stressful happens: "Hmm. That's very chill".

• when anyone had a good performance on a take: "you are good at music."

• when anyone had any level of differing opinion: "I hate it when my Dads fight"

• when someone didn't include him in a conversation: "cheers for the call!"

• and almost constantly…when he himself said something shocking, untoward, or rude: "Kaler! That's terrible!"

It's Josh's thing to keep people laughing, keep the mood light. He's good at it and it's very appreciated.

We didn't take a day off in the 12 that we were in Nashville. The Sunday we had free we took the song that will be our first single…oh. I didn't mention recording our first single!

We had asked our old friend Jake Sinclair to produce a song, who along with Michael Trent (Shovels and Rope), Kenny Harris (Panic @ the Disco) and Adam Blake (The Made Shop) was a member of The Films, a band that we somehow convinced to move to Charleston in the early 2000s and who did a better job of being a rock and roll band than we ever did. Everyone in that band has gone on to soaring heights, Jake included: he has been producing some of my favorite artists in the past decade (Weezer, Sia) and playing with all kinds of fun bands. It was touching to us, and kind of a big deal for him to try to fit in some production work into his busy schedule; he's currently on tour with Beck. But the stars continue to be aligned for little old us: Beck came to Nashville for a couple of days and Jake hopped off the bus and ran in and recorded a song, fully, in two days.

We called Jake the "Tasmanian Angel" because he's very sweet and very intense. He is a human whirlwind. He had done his homework, knew what he wanted to hear, which instruments, which arrangements, etc. He rarely sat down. When we got the drums and bass done, he grabbed a guitar and played two extra parts. He threw us all down into an echo-y room and had us sing "gang vocals": vocals featuring all five of us. He wanted each verse phrase to be accented by claps (which he called "friends"), so we were tossed into a booth and clapped through the song. It was a blast. We are so proud of and honored to work with him.

The Sunday we had off we spent the day making a video for this single that we recorded with Jake. We didn't really have a budget for a video, but once again Lady Luck was looking out for us. She sent our old friend Matthew Sterling our way, who was responsible for the funniest and most interesting parts of our Jump, Little Children DVD. Matt has become a total pro, and is currently putting together visuals to go with the song for publicity. We hope that there is an edit that features our official studio dog, Bernie. And one that stars our friend Clay as "the stalker".

By the way…if you'd like to help us pay for these incredible folk that are donating time and energy to our cause, you can do so by going to http://pledgemusic.com/jump-little-children . Your pledges will get you a copy of the album, of course, but will also allow us to stop begging favors from these incredible artists. Thank you, thank you.

Next steps! We're listening to the roughs made during this time. We'll have some tweaks and other ideas. Then we go back for overdubs, adding official vocals instead of the "scratch" ones, harmonies, different instruments. The songs will continue to evolve, change, take form. But we have such a great base for the nine so far. Then we head to Charleston to record a few with that town's new producing celeb, Wolfgang Zimmerman. Don't try to stop us!

We had never heard of Hootie and the Blowfish until we moved to Charleston, SC. We can be forgiven; in 1994 they were just at the point of catapulting past being a "regional band" into being a national one. Also, we had been listening strictly to Irish music and country blues for the past few years, and straight-up classical music before that, so we were very much out of the rock and roll loop. I started listening to Nirvana right after Kurt died, and the radio station in Boston had been playing Beck, Juliana Hatfield, G Love and Special Sauce, and whatever boring band Evan Dando was in.

When we got to Charleston, there was a lot of "pop punk" on 96 Wave: the Offspring, Green Day, Everclear, and then some Smashing Pumpkins and a lot of Alanis Morissette. We fell in love with Bjork and Radiohead, ourselves. But the bands that were popular with the majority of boys and girls in Charleston in '94-95 were groovy. Bands you could do the "itchy scratchy" to. Jam bands were back, but maybe had never left this coastal town? Dave Matthews was somewhat interesting because he had a fiddler and saxophonist. Widespread Panic was carrying the torch of the Dead. And if you wanted something to sing to, frat-rock was the perfect thing for people that wanted to have a good time, celebrate being in college or romanticize about your days in college, and not think too much about…anything. Besides beer. "It's all about the beer," Darius Rucker once told me, and it certainly seemed like he truly meant it.

One of the most popular bands in the country in '95 was claiming South Carolina as home. Everyone in Charleston had a Hootie story. How the band ate at this and that restaurant all the time. Someone saw Soni doing his laundry at the corner laundromat. The guy that sold us our first touring vehicle, a 15 passenger blue van, told us that not too long before he had sold a similar vehicle to someone with a "sweet, soulful voice". Our blank stares encouraged him to add: "Darius Rucker!".

I was surprised to find that the guys in Hootie had grown up worshiping bands like R.E.M.: Southern rock bands that weren't Southern Rock bands and had almost literally created many of the venues that we were wanting to play in the South. I, too, worshipped R.E.M., for many reasons (and still do). Their original sound, their fight for creativity even after getting signed to a major label, Stipe's flair for the dramatic. Knowing that the Hootie guys liked one of my favorite bands endeared them to me, even if I coudn't get behind their music. Hootie was exceptionally supportive towards all things Southern, and especially bands. They wanted to give back to the scene they had helped to create, like R.E.M. did in Athens, GA. This would prove to be very good for us, later, and then very bad for us, much later. But we'll get to those chapters eventually.

Thanks in part to the nation's eye on Hootie's ascension, and the aforementioned indie-power of 96Wave, it was a good time to be a touring band in South Carolina. And then around both South and North Carolina. And then Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, Florida, Alabama, Maryland…we took it slow and steady, and tried to be smart about touring. We had bought a van from Darius's dealer and hit the road. But we didn't do what a lot of our peers did. We followed the Golden Mean: "the desirable middle between two extremes, one of excess and the other of deficiency." In other words, while fellow bands living in GA would take gigs in Ohio just because they existed, and then Los Angeles, and then maybe the Carolinas, driving all over the place for one gig that probably didn't pay and was hard to get to over and over to build a crowd, we worked in more of a spiral. We figured it was better to say "no" to the venue far away until we had made fans in towns in-between Charleston and that venue, first.

We didn't have dimes to our names (we refused to let each other get jobs, remember?) to even pay to get to the gigs, at first. We auditioned at a NACA conference to try and land more college gigs, and were "wooed" (they took us to Applebees and bought us jalapeño poppers) by husband-wife team the Rosens, who became booking agents that tried to find us places to play in college settings for a larger sum of money. These places ended up being frat houses, cafeterias at lunchtime, pep rallies. These gigs were almost entirely disappointing, but there were a few benefits to starting our touring career this way. First and foremost, we were learning about all the kinds of shows we would never want to play again. We discovered that we were not a band that was comfortable playing "in the background", and would rather play to three fans than a roomful of inattentive bodies. Secondly, the larger sums of money let us pay for gas to the shows we wanted to play that didn't pay that much at first. We could get to Columbia to play Rockafellas, the Moon Room in Charlotte, the 40 Watt in Athens, opening up for larger bands that would give us a chance.

And we were able to put together our first album of original music.

We had gotten original member Ward Williams back. We had finally seduced Jonathan Gray away from his role of bass player with Big Stoner Creek (sorry, again, George Fox!). We had driven the downstairs neighbors out from our compound on Coming Street, and we couldn’t throw a rock without hitting a sorority sister. It was a good time.

We spent a third of our evenings getting ripped off but still loving to play The Horse and Cart, a third trying to learn about rock and roll at the King Street Station, and a third on the street, busking. During the day we wrote songs, kept Ward from turning on the air conditioning, and played video games. Typical 20-something behavior.

It’s interesting, looking back, at how long we were able to play on the street, in a town that wasn’t really known for buskers. Not like Boston or New Orleans, anyway. And we were surviving. Barely, but we were paying bills. I don’t remember being in massive debt or the lights going out or anything. It was a feral existence, but we made it work.

One night we were busking and a passersby handed us a card. She said that she worked at the local radio station 96Wave. Hooray! We were going to be famous, right?

Understand that if you’re in a band that plays on the street where legions of people walk by, a lot of weird stuff happens to you. Frat boys constantly yell at you to “get a real job”. Strangers that have no musical talent walk over with a ukulele and start “jamming” with you. Pretty girls (and boys) flirt. Intoxicated tourists (women included) hike down their pants in the middle of the street and urinate. Drugs are thrown into your guitar case. And everyone knows someone that will make you famous, or is connected in some way to something that will make you famous. You soon realize that most people that come up to talk to you about a connection in the music industry are really not that connected at all. It’s fine. It’s best to be nice, give them your telephone number, and forget about it.

Which we did with the nice lady that worked at the radio station. But a week later we got a phone call from 96Wave. They were doing an interview feature on Charleston’s local bands: a little chat, and a live acoustic version of any song we wanted to play. It wasn’t the first time we had been on the radio, but it was the first time we had been on a rock and roll radio station.

This was 1995ish. It was to be one of the most positive experiences with radio that we would ever have in our careers, because very soon after our first trip to 96Wave, radio as we knew it started to die. Now, I know that radio still exists, and it might be better than what it became in the late 90s/early 2000s, but it’s all very different from pre-1996 radio. Radio changed very drastically right as we were starting our career.

Things went down like this: in the 90s, radio stations were struggling. Not all of them, but the golden days of coke-and-cash fueled payola in the 80s were winding down. Mostly because they got rid of payola. Before 1996, one person or company could only own about 40 radio stations, due to the rules against monopolies. But in 1996 the FCC got rid of that 40-station limit, and within a couple of years almost every “mom and pop” independent radio station that was having a hard time keeping things going had to sell to giant corporations that bought up almost all of them. The name “ClearChannel” became a swear word to us.

This undoing of the monopoly rules completely changed radio. Now one company owned thousands of stations, and if that one company liked, say, Hootie and the Blowfish but did not like Davíd Garza or David Mead, the Davids would not get played on the radio. And not just one to forty radio stations…they might not get played on thousands of radio stations.

I’m really oversimplifying this, but it hurt. We felt it immediately. We’d roll up on a cool station that had been playing us, meet everyone there, and find out that they were being bought out, and only signed bands would get played, and that did not include Jump, Little Children, no matter how much the DJs at the station liked us. For the most part, the days of local and regional bands getting played on radio were done.

Side note for those that think that our government’s undoing of nationwide net neutrality laws isn’t that big of a deal: I ask you to think again. To me, allowing ginormous corporations to decide what kind of internet you get is exactly like ClearChannel owning most radio stations and deciding what kind of music you get. If we don’t take a stand and take care, you won’t even be aware of what you’ll be missing, folks. Trust me, that’s a very sad thing. So go out and fight for these amazing people in your local governments that are trying to create net neutrality in your state. You won’t regret it.

The silver lining to losing radio was how it inspired people to build new ways to find new music, on the internet. Eventually the true movers and shakers in music would turn to using sites and apps like Pandora and Spotify and YouTube to introduce interesting indie bands to the world. So, yeah. Let’s lobby to make our own nets neutral, please?

Anyway! Back to The Wave. 96Wave, bless their hearts, wanted to hold out against The Man for as long as they could. At the helm was a guy named Dave Rossi, and he was not going to cave. At least until he had us in the studio and recorded us playing a song. The song was called “Quiet”, and Dave liked it enough to try putting the song into a semi-regular rotation on the station, first during a “local hour” and then alongside other national acts.

There is what happens when you hear yourself on the radio for the first time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EdOdfCM1hM It’s really like that. We heard Quiet on the radio and lost our minds. Jumping around, running into streets, lots of screaming. It’s an exciting thing.

Things changed for us very quickly - that’s how much power radio had, back then. We had just started playing a “Free Music Tuesday” at the Music Farm in Charleston - no cover at the door. The first time or two we had played the Farm, the largest and coolest venue in town, there were couple dozen people or so. After Wave started playing us on the radio, the place was packed. We would play entire months of Tuesdays, even putting together “Theme Nights” to keep us (and the fans that were there every Tuesday) in the fun. “50s Night”, “Wizard of Oz Night”, “Slumber Party Night” (we were running out of ideas by that point) were so fun to put together. We got better and better as a rock band, finally buying the proper equipment necessary to plug in and play shows. And it started to change our sound. We had never thought of ourselves as a rock band, truly, until that point. But play in front of a thousand people every week and you find that you have to be bigger, be louder, be…serious.

Our hard work was starting to pay off, and we had to start thinking about what was next. Charleston was officially our home base, and a very strong base. It was time to hit the road.

Welcome back to “Ask Matt” a series of entries that speak to real questions that come to us from people that like the music of Jump, Little Children.

We’ll get right into it. The topic of today’s post is the list-serv/website/Facebook Group that we have named Opium.

If you’re looking for the history of the song, I really should let songwriter Jay Clifford speak to that. It’s about an experience some members of the band had in New York City in 1991. Many people have asked why we haven’t played the song in recent years. Again, I’ll let Jay answer that one, but don’t hold your breath.

There have been a bunch of questions about the origin of what became known as Opium, our first foray into “social media”. Long before Facebook, MySpace or even Friendster, we had Opium. We reached out to the creator of the listserv and Jump’s first website, Jennifer Fisher(-Bowman), for answers. Here’s the origin story, in her own words, written circa 1996:

A long lo time ago, at a free College of Charleston show, I went to see the Pushdaises. Opening for them was Jump, Little Children. I liked them a lot. I saw them again at the Horse and Cart [a popular cafe in Charleston in 1996 - Ed.] and boy, those boys could rock. So I saw them whenever they played.

I found a place on the web (called the Turnpike, but it's gone now) where I could get a whole [megabyte] of webspace for free! Wow, I thought. I sought out to find a subject for my newfound hobby [of building websites]. You must understand I'm a computer-geek at heart and I wanted to learn this hot new programming language on the web.

So I decided to approach Jump, Little Children about doing their page. While they took a break from their show at the Horse and Cart on June 9, 1995, I approached Jay, introduced myself and asked him if he knew of the internet. Surprise, he didn't. I tried to explain what I wanted to do and he said “that sounds cool”.

One day, the phone rang. It was Matt. He had seen the page and wanted to pow-wow about it. So we did. He gave me pictures. The page looked better.

The page was featured in the Upwith Herald as well at the Post and Courier [The Upwith was the most popular free paper in Charleston, the P&C still the main rag there. -Ed.]. I [re-]named the page the PlayRoom, and then near the end of 1995, established Opium, the mailing list for which the band is becoming famous (or infamous).

Jenn goes on to note that fans building websites for local, smaller bands they liked was not a thing that happened often in the 90s, and I can attest to that. There were online communities for well-known bands, like R.E.M. and 10,000 Maniacs. But Jenn was a pioneer in that she started a listserv for a band that had barely begun its career. Even though I (and Jay, apparently) didn’t really know what the Internet was, I did know that we were on the cutting edge of something. She had no way of knowing that she would connect us to a relatively “underground” group of people, members of this new internet, and build us a fan base before we even actually started touring. Jenn, again:

I was quite familiar with nerdy fanatics discussing shows, lyrics, trading bootlegs and really finding a kinship – because if you loved the same music, you already had a huge thing in common. By the time access to the listserver rolled around, the Playroom really was more about [Jump, Little Children] then the “coding”.

So the name, Opium? Even though I missed the boat on seeing 10,000 Maniacs, I knew the folks on the listserv that did see them, or Natalie Merchant solo, had one thing in common. They all wore these small buttons that say “10K”. It was an obvious appreciation for the band, but also a little secret sign to other folks on the listserv to say “Hey! Come talk to me! You might know me!”

I thought/envisioned that by choosing “Opium” – a song [title] that was short and a noun – we could recreate this 10K button idea – either OPIUM or OPM or the chemical symbol for Opium (which is way more complicated than I thought at the time). That never really happened, though we would ask strangers “do you smoke opium?” and usually they thought we were drug dealers.

In all honesty, the mailing list was founded before [the band] debuted Underground Elite. Had that song been out at the time, I would have jumped all over that song for the mailing list name. (And, truthfully, I’d rather hear that song over Opium at a show anyway).

Boom! Us, too, Jenn! But again…why we do or do not play the song “Opium” is the topic for another post.

She goes on to say that she used to go to our shows armed with cards with our logo, a random phrase, and the web address of the Playroom on it. She and friends would hand them out to concertgoers. They also would write the URL on bathroom walls, and admits that “There may have been other bits of graffiti involved.”

I didn’t know this, and it’s amazing. The person that built our website and created our online community went all Shepard Fairey about Jump, Little Children.

I have always been proud of the various incarnations of the band website, and I hope that it’s obvious that we have all taken the gift of an online connection with people all over the country and world very seriously. It’s partly the reason we did well without much radio play or label support twenty years ago, and it’s part of the reason why we still have people to write this post to.

Thank you, JennFishBow, for being the nerd that made this possible for us. And in part for inspiring me to be the nerd that I always wanted to be. And…for basically writing this post for me, today. I can’t wait to see you in Boston!

By the way…for those of you that have no idea what I’m even talking about here, there are ways to be in the know. Please join our Facebook Group, Opium 3, and say “howdy” to all the folk that hold the true keys to the JLC experience. But be cool, and don’t tell ‘em I sent you.

- Matt Bivins 

In this new (and hopefully interesting) “Ask Matt” series of posts, I’m going to be answering questions from the public at large. Some of these questions might be directed to other members of the band, but I’ll still be the one answering them. Sorry.

Tonight’s question comes from Alison Kendrick, of Charlotte, NC, and hopefully answers a query from Lindsay Badeaux of Chicago, IL: 

“Why do you play so many instruments? How did you learn to play them all? And when have you had time to do so?”

Thanks, Alison & Lindsay! Great question(s), and ones that I have been asked a lot, so it’s great that I’ll now be able to send people this handy URL for the answer!

The “Why” of this topic is easy to answer: I “suffer” from ADHD. I was officially diagnosed in my 30s, but of course have had it since I was little and my way of coping was to try and get my hands into as many things as possible. ADHD can be great. You’re never bored. You seem to know lots and lots of things. You can’t really become the master of anything, because focusing is extremely difficult and – ooh! Shiny! – but it makes you great at parties because you never have a lull in topics you know a tiny bit about. Side note: if anyone reading this knows of and trusts an ADHD coach, please send ‘em my way. 

I can make decent noises on: the tin whistle, the recorder, the Irish flute, the accordion, harmonica, clarinet, guitar, mandolin, 5-string mandolin, ukulele, banjo, and a few others. How did I learn these instruments? Probably the easiest way for me to answer that one is to break things down by instrument. 

Tin Whistle/Recorder: 

I start here because the first instrument I ever played was a plastic recorder, given to all the kids in my elementary class to teach the very basics of music. You might have gotten one, too. I loved it, and was the only kid in my class that stuck with the recorder. The recorder is a flute that evolved from the tin (penny) whistle, a simple wind instrument that is tied to Ireland and Scotland. If you can play the recorder, you can make sounds on the tin whistle. I got my first tin whistle in Virginia at an “old timey shoppe” and it sat on a shelf for a long time. In college I started playing traditional Irish tunes on the whistle with my Irish roommate Christopher. I fell in love with Irish music and it’s still my go-to practice when I just want to play. 

Harmonica: 

My grandfather gave me a box of harmonicas one Christmas when I was around 11. It was the kind of weird gift John Frank (our name for our very tall, very austere grandfather) would give us: after all the flashy, fun toys there was one completely unwrapped thing that we were supposed to open. Usually pottery, or Russian stacking dolls, or other trinkets from he and my grandmother Honey’s trips around the world. Stuff that little kids didn’t really appreciate, in other words. 

And I didn’t especially appreciate the harmonicas, to be honest. A box of harmonicas is such a strange thing to give a little kid, but I love that he didn’t just give me one. He gave me close to a dozen, in a bunch of different keys. The harmonica is a diatonic instrument, which means that you can only play a range of keys with one. If you’re in a band you need quite a few to be able to play songs in many different keys. I have about twenty accessible at any given time: major and minor tunings. 

It’s normal to give a kid a harmonica in the key of C, say. They can learn how to play, see if they like it, and if so, they can buy any other key they need. But John Frank gave me a full set. It was as if he knew that I’d grow up and use all of them all the time. 

Melodica:

The next year John Frank gave me a melodica that had belonged to him. It was a Hohner, but a very old one, extremely well made. Very little plastic on it…the thing had a gorgeous wood frame and Bakelite keys. It was still working (mostly) when we recorded Licorice Tea Demos, but the reeds finally gave out, and I spent a LOT of pre-internet time trying to fix it, to no avail. The new melodicas, honestly, are extremely disappointing. Cheaply made, cheaper sounding, not in tune, and they don’t last very long. As the US president says: “Sad!”. 

Clarinet: 

I thought that the clarinet was similar to the recorder, and I had to choose an instrument that I wanted to play in middle school. It isn’t that similar to the recorder, but the clarinet ended up being a big part of my life for many years. I know now that it was just a “gateway instrument” to the rest of my life; playing it allowed me to get on stage and perform. I was accepted into art school for clarinet. I don’t think I was ever really in love with it, and never miss playing it, but I’m grateful to it for setting me on a very interesting life path. And I still get psyched when I hear a recording of Mozart K622. That adagio is sweet as hell!

Accordion:

I asked to have piano lessons when I was small. It looked fun to me. I had a great teacher until she moved away and then I had a sexy but unpleasant teacher that replaced her and I stopped taking piano. My left hand is shit but you don’t really need a good left hand when playing piano accordion. Note to people that want to play the accordion but are scared of the left-hand bass buttons: don’t worry about ‘em. Find a bass player instead and get on with your life. 

The first accordion I bought was during the making of the Licorice Tea Demos, and I bought one because my grandfather’s melodica was falling apart (see above). Buying accordions can be a sickness; I have owned a total of four in my time and they’re really hard to give away. Would anyone like to buy an accordion?

Mandolin:

Jay and Ward played guitar. I wanted something to play that would allow me to “jump around” and “rock out”. They didn’t want to have another guitar in the band, so I picked up a mandolin. Of all the instruments I have learned, this was the toughest, because I had no concept of stringed instruments. But you work through it. Later I commissioned a fellow in the depths of South Carolina to build me a custom electric mandolin with five strings (hot pink, SG style) and I still love that abomination. People always wonder what The Abomination is. Based on the way it’s tuned, I suppose you should rightly call it “an electric piccolo cittern”. 

You may notice some patterns forming. Playing an instrument is like learning languages. If you learn one, fine. Learn two pretty well, and the third one is easier to pick up. Four, five, six…they’re all variations on a theme. 

My love of playing the recorder led to picking up the tin whistle easily. Clarinet isn’t that similar, but once I learned how to play it, I was able to play other reed instruments like the saxophone and oboe. Taking piano let me be competent enough on the melodica, and the accordion is basically a melodica that you don’t blow into. The harmonica was tough. But you can fit one in your pocket and I had a whole box of them lying around. The good news is that I can pick up a button accordion or concertina and get around based on what I know about the harmonica. Mandolin was also a stretch, but once I developed some calluses I’ve been able to play the banjo, guitar, and bass guitar. 

The best way to learn a new instrument, especially if you have ADHD? Make it hard to ignore. Put it in a pocket, on the living room table, visible on a shelf. You’ll find that you’re practicing way more than you think, just picking it up and playing for a minute or two. A minute or two can lead to half an hour, or six. You can trick yourself into learning things! This is how I finally cracked the embouchure for the Irish flute. 

That should be the “why”, “when” and “how” of your question! If you have any follow ups on this topic, or actually do know an ADHD coach, you can write me at [email protected] or [email protected]. 

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When we sat down to the band meeting on January 2nd, I knew for the most part what we were going to be discussing, and was excited about getting to it. 

It felt a little like we were hiring each other for new jobs. Vance the Manager had the year planned out; at the meeting he was organized, concise, realistic. He had a manilla folder full of notes, and on the name tab of that folder was written “Chapter Two”.

It does feel like a new chapter, for us. It feels familiar, but very different. I think we’re all smarter than we were ten years ago. I think we care more; I think that we want to be a bigger part of what makes a band a business, and share what we’ve learned in the past decade, and do things more efficiently and intelligently. I’m not about to break into corporate-speak here, but…it’s not always sexy, you know, being in a rock and roll band. It can be sexier than some other jobs, but as soon as you leave the “just playing at the local bar for fun” phase, it’s a business. We were very happy in 2005 to give it a good, long, break. 

However, it is not lost on us that this “Chapter Two” that is happening is rare, special, seemingly meant to be, and we would all be stupid if we didn’t see where it leads. 

So where does it lead? I asked that question half a year ago, and didn’t have many answers. I have more, now. We are going to create something new, and we want to then be able to put that thing out and see how the world has changed. We know that you care, but what about people that didn’t know us 10 years ago? Maybe we can find them, too? I’ve heard a lot over the years that this band was “around at the wrong time”. I’m not sure that I agree, but I understand the sentiment. We became a band just after radio died, just before social media became something you could harness, we lived between the death of grunge and the (re)birth of boy/girl bands and rap-rock. Bands like the Decemberists and Mumford and Sons and even the Avetts didn’t flourish until after we started our hiatus. I could see how it would seem like we “missed the boat” by taking a break in 2005.

Would it have made a difference to have started earlier or later? I don’t know, and I don’t think that it matters, to any of us. Moving on. Jump’s first chapter was important to the story, had great character development and strong plot choices. But now we have the chance to start writing on a blank page. Once we started leaving the feeling of being a “reunion band” behind, there was only one other option: to start writing the story where we left off. 

This means we spend the next three months writing songs. Then we’re going to go into a studio with someone we know and trust, do some pre-production work (choose songs, re-configure parts, maybe write more things and decide how they’ll sound). The songs we write have to mean something to us - that was the only stipulation we have. I know that sounds obvious, but it isn’t always (says that guy that seems to only write songs about sex). The songs won’t sound like “old Jump”, and they won’t not sound like “old Jump”. They will sound like us, and we’ll just have to wait to see what that sounds like.

Speaking of old Jump, and to those that have been asking, we probably won’t go through archives and record songs written ten years ago. We know that you would love to hear some of them officially recorded. We’d love to hear some of them officially recorded, too. But please understand that the goal this year is to create new things. Thank you. 

We write. Then we record, and have fun doing so. Mix, master, and send it out. We chose PledgeMusic for crowdfunding because Jay and Vance had used it before and they seem to be a classy operation. We like the fact that they have the ability to distribute the album digitally, when it’s ready. One of the nicest changes in the past decade to the music industry is the resources independent bands have at their disposal. Startups now handle most aspects of what a label is supposed to do for you. You can truly be your own label, by both name and function. 

We will see if anyone is interested in putting these songs on TV/movie soundtracks. We’ll see if radio (whatever that is, nowadays) will play us. We live in a non-denominational world of lots of interesting sounds from all kinds of musicians that find homes in playlists. We would love to be part of many of those playlists. 

Then we tour! Which is exciting for everyone. We’re going back to the Southeast. We’re going to the Northeast. We’re dipping a little bit into the Midwest. And that’s probably where the money (and the interest from venues) will run out. But it’s a very exciting start. We have some really exciting ideas for the end of the year, too. I don’t want to talk about them before we know if it’ll all work, but I’ll just say that 1. we miss the days of doing Acoustic Tours in December and 2. Jay’s orchestrations of our songs need to be heard as often as possible.

That’s a full-ass year, y’all. As I’m writing this, I am aware that this winter is kind of going to be the quietest, most “normal” part of our year. Vance is busy booking dates and other admin stuff, Jay is writing songs full-time, Evan and I are handling design/PR/media and, well, writing blog entries. Johnny and Ward are cheering everyone on, ready to tag in when needed. There will be so many unknown elements to this year. How high with the PledgeMusic campaign go? What will happen when the album is released? Could this be our living, as well as our creative outlet? Time will tell. 

I wrote a couple of years ago that we didn’t want this to be our full-time job any more. I still mean that. I don’t want to back to the way things were before, in Jump’s “first chapter”. Forever on the road, forever penniless, forever fighting record labels for respect, forever worrying about what would happen if the band stopped. Yes, I had something in my life that I was 100% passionate about. I was surrounded by brothers. I got to perform for a living, to be a full-time artist, to see the world, to meet so many amazing people. But the other parts - the parts that have so little to do with all of that - were a drag.

We’re not going to let those parts drag us down again. We’re in control, this time. We don’t need a record label, because we have you. We don’t need this band to be our life, because we already have lives that we love. But…we love this band. Always have. Can you imagine how freeing it is to be allowed to do something that you love doing, again, but this time without a huge bunch of bullshit attached? Where the only goal is to make sure that what you are doing is real, and honest, and meaningful, and fun? 

Yep. It feels pretty great. And we know that if it stops being any of the above things, we can walk away, again, no hard feelings, no big deal. But even if we do walk away, it will have been worth it. We will have learned new things, spent time with people we love, written another chapter in this…book. 

We were only allowed two hours total to rehearse with the Charleston Symphony Orchestra, so we wanted to make sure any delays or issues weren’t on us in those two hours. Evan came up with the great idea of having our last rehearsal be public, to get any jitters/issues out in the open before we moved to the Music Hall.

The Woolfe Street Playhouse opened after I had already left Charleston for Chicago. I didn’t know of it, but the place is beautiful. We choose the “cabaret seating” setup, and moved our gear from the rehearsal space to the Playhouse.

It was one of the most intimate shows we’d been able to do in a long time. We hadn’t played smaller venues since we started playing again in ‘15, and this rehearsal show allowed us take our time, laugh at mistakes, talk a lot to each other and the audience. It was so much fun. Our friends Bill Carson and Amanda Kapousouz played with us. Johnny and I played a song Bill wrote (Cabbage, Cotton, Corn) for a play that I was in called Like I Am. Amanda sang Do You Love an Apple, an old Irish favorite of ours. And it was the world premiere of the two new songs Jay had written, White Buffalo and The Protagonist (Beach House Tattoo). The Woolfe Street Playhouse was perfect.

Our first day at the Charleston Music Hall was a long one. Reunited with my cousin Michael Rogers on sound, we loaded in instruments and gear and had our sound check before the orchestra members got there. The CSO is a union orchestra with pretty strict rules about starting times and amount of breaks and when to end. We had learned the hard way in the past that there is little to no wiggle room with these rules. So everything had to be ready and set, because every second counted. We had a ton of material to cover in a very short amount of time.

The Symphony members were made up of about 20 strings, horns, vibes, and two woodwinds: flute and oboe. Some of them had worked with us before (hi, Norbert, Tom, Deb!), some had worked with Jay in the last ten years, but I’m guessing that most hadn’t heard of us, and I doubt that many had played with a rock band before. You never know whether playing with a rock band is going to be something fun and different for a classical musician or somewhat of an annoyance. We were hoping for more of the former.

It’s a difficult job to get, a difficult one to keep. At the larger symphonies, you can be fired for making one mistake. There is always someone ready and able to take your place, so the competition is exhausting. As a clarinet player at the North Carolina School of the Arts, being in an orchestra was the assumed career path for me until, of course, my roommate Chris and I started a folk band called Jump, Little Children. But even before then I knew I didn’t have what it took to be a full-time orchestra member. So I have mad respect.

We ran through the set list as efficiently as possible. There was a lot of music, and Jay doesn’t write particularly easy parts. Some of the songs came together instantly with the orchestra and some had to be dropped from the list. There was a frustrating moment when we couldn’t get the balance of hearing ourselves in stage monitors and hearing the orchestra - so many more parts that needed to be accounted for. But we managed to make it work in the allotted time. It was great to see Jay fully in his element; to see what he’d been doing for the past decade. He was a firm and confident leader; knew what he wanted out of the group without needing to be a total dick about it. When the arrangements did come together perfectly, and the sound filled the stage…it was breathtaking.

And then the shows. They were great. You were there, right? Jay’s parents celebrated 55 years of marriage and danced in the isles of the theater in spotlight, Amanda Kapousouz played fiddle and every night it made me choke up thinking about how much I miss playing with her, the utterly a-dork-able (I think she’d approve that adjective…) Katie Rose charmed the socks off the crowd on NYE, there were balloons that fell from the sky at midnight, and I wore plaid and starred suits.

(About those suits, because everyone asked me: it’s a company called Oppo Suits. There was a stack of them at my favorite men’s discount suit store here in Chicago, and as soon as I saw them I knew that there would be many in my future. Inexpensive, ridiculous, and surprisingly flattering. I’m a big fan.)

We love the Charleston Music Hall. We love every single person that works there. We especially love Charles Carmody, the manager, who has brought the theater to the great heights it currently enjoys. He supports  local bands, he brings in national acts, he loves movies and dance and art. He’s our kind of dude, and we hope he’ll have us back next year. The staff there finally kicked everyone out waiting in the lobby to talk to us at 2am on New Year’s Day, but they kicked us out so kindly that I didn’t even mind.

This has been a longer post, and there is still Part Three to come, so I’ll end with this: these shows were rehearsed and performed with the knowledge that we were having a big meeting at the first of the year, to discuss 2018 plans. Up to this point, we had done a lot of talking about what was going to happen next. Then we had publicly announced that there was going to be something next. So…

Jay first played us “White Buffalo” in 2015, actually. During that first reunion tour it was nuts to think that we’d have the time to learn anything new - remembering the older songs was enough. Just in case, Jay sat us down in his studio and played us a couple of songs that he had written that hadn’t found a home on a solo project or given to someone else.

White Buffalo was the one that stood out to me, personally; it sounded like it could be a Jump song. Not something you’d find on Dim & the Dark or Licorice Tea, but a song that the five of us could get together and make our own. But we’d have to wait two years to work on it.

We didn’t talk about learning new music again until April of this year, at High Water, where we played for eight thousand people that acted like they might be willing to keep singing along to our songs, and even new ones if we wrote them. Jay turned to me and said, “Maybe we should make a new album?” and the thought was in our heads again.

I was nervous about learning something brand new. We hadn’t sat down to learn a new song in more than ten years. What would be the same? What would be different? Would it be frustrating to go back to this, or fun? What was the current state of our egos? I mean, we’d had life experiences that undoubtedly cemented some opinions about how to do things. Would I have anything to contribute? I was feeling insecure about the amount of music I’d played in the past 12 years compared to everyone else.

I shouldn’t have worried. Being back in the rehearsal room and working on new stuff was a relatively joyful process. We were happy to learn parts from Jay’s excellent demos of the songs and he was happy to let us make those parts our own. We were adulting up a storm: egos were in-check and compliments shared all ‘round.

The biggest problem with the second song Jay brought to the table was what we were going to call it. In the demos he sent us it was known as “the Protagonist”. We liked that. But by the time we got to Charleston he was referring to it as “Beach House Tattoo”…the name that his son Wyatt preferred. We’re still not sure who’ll win out in the end, but it’s a lovely song.

One neat new option we had to prepare for playing with a symphony orchestra: it was now easy for Jay to create tracks of synth instruments to play along to, so we wouldn’t be surprised at any of the changes or additions a group of strings, horns, and woodwinds might create to a song. For most of the week we basically played to a boombox that played orchestra parts. A boombox is not a toy.

We were working on a pretty limited time budget. Jonathan had been living in Mexico for the last few months and wasn’t even getting back into town until right after Christmas. So we had to do the bulk of the work before he got there and hope he still had the magical ability to find the right thing to play in any situation. He did. To celebrate, we took him to a Mexican (Gringo) restaurant. That’s how we like to do things.

My wife, Lindsay, who is deaf, has seen more theater in the past year than she has in her entire life. She loves it. And that’s thanks to the cobbled-together code that I call CaptionPoint Alpha, code that I put together when Chicago theater companies and festivals and other live events started asking me to caption shows and performances for the d/Deaf and hard of hearing (“DHH”, for short).

I didn’t set out to be the “DIY captioning guru” of Chicago; I just wanted to build software that would make it easier for these institutions to caption their shows, themselves. But I am really glad that I have been asked to do this work. I now know exactly what my software needs to be. How it should work, and how to make it easier to use. I have learned (and am still learning) the subtleties of the art of captioning, itself. I’ve made amazing, supportive friends, and even have a CaptionPoint Team that helps me provide captioning to the 200+ theaters in the Chicago area.

But I know that this isn’t a sustainable situation. Right now, CaptionPoint is providing a service. It’s in a very raw form, and mostly unusable to the average non-nerd, but if I build it right it will be the first system for theaters, religious centers, politicians, language translators – anyone, anywhere that needs to deliver a scripted speech, live – that is focused on building readable, editable, captions on a budget.

I’ve started a concerted effort to try and raise funds to make CaptionPoint better. Links:

http://captionpoint.com/jump-little-children/charlotte

or 

http://captionpoint.com/jump-little-children/columbia

Any amount would help me hire better developers, creative designers (like my brother Evan), amazing marketing folk, and would also allow me to take on this project full-time. I have been able to make the Chicago theater scene more accessible to the d/Deaf and hard of hearing in one short year working on CaptionPoint part-time. I could do so much more, in and outside Chicago, if it was what I woke up to do every morning.

It’s a good question. I think I have an answer, though.

I’m writing this a week before the first show of our second leg of the Jump Tour 2017. Tomorrow we’re going to be meeting in a house in West Ashley, SC, and start practicing. We have fun, practicing. We have fun when we get together. Since it’s the only time we really see each other, for us playing music is a really nice way to spend time with good friends.

There is no pressure from a record label or manager to be a band, and that makes me happy. But we have liked being a band again. After returning to old haunts like Cat’s Cradle and the Variety Playhouse, and after being a part of the High Water Festival, we felt like doing this could be something that was meaningful, even if only part-time. Being with our family of fans feels meaningful. You told us in April that if we kept doing this, you’d keep coming to see us, and we are going to hold you to that.

We know we can’t be on a Jump, Little Children Reunion Tour forever. We may have a lot of songs in our catalogue, but it’s still a catalogue written more than ten years ago. In order to move forward, we have to write new songs.

After April, we made a decision to try to write. And we’ve put together some bits and pieces, and also a little more than bits and pieces. The hard part is writing Jump, Little Children songs, because that’s a specific kind of song to us. A song that we can hear being played by the five of us.

We’re not going to force anything. If things click, great! If inspiration strikes, killer diller! If not, we will have given it a shot. There is no point in putting pressure on ourselves; it can’t be a drag. It has to be a blast. Maybe we’ll have something new to share next weekend, maybe not. There is a lot to do, this week: learning the entirety of Licorice Tea Demos and Buzz and every obscure “B-side” will take forever, right? ;)

I want to do a better job of letting everyone in on the fun. We’re not in Jay’s dark studio this time (but thank you, old Rutledge house - we’ll miss you!), so there will be more light for Live Feeds on Facebook. More room for filming us trying to remember parts and lyrics. More photos of five guys laughing at things that only they find funny. But that’s how it is with good friends, right?

I used to write a Thanksgiving “journal entry” every year. Of course, back then the process involved writing something in an email, taking a picture on a three or four megapixel digital camera, spending a half hour trying to get those images into my computer, then sending that email with attached photos to our Webmaster. Who then had to code the post by hand to add it to the website*.

It’s a heck of a lot easier, now, of course.

But I’m no less thankful for all of Jump’s fans and friends and family. Depending on where you stand, politically, the end of this year was either a tragedy or a triumph. Most people reading this know where I stand, personally (or can probably guess), but either way, it’s always nice to have something to look forward to. To make some time to reconnect with said fans and friends and family in a less digital way; to do some shaking of hands and kissing of babies of our own. It felt like a perfect time to polish off the old “Pink Abomination” and head out with my pals Jonny, Jay, Ward, and brother Evan. Welcome to the Jump, Little Children Tour 2017 (Official Name Pending).

Since last December, we have been offered quite a few shows. They were all tempting, and flattering. But as I posted last, this isn’t our full-time job any more, and we have to be picky if we’re going to keep it fun and sane. Since December we have all had full plates: Evan and I spent the winter in Mexico working on apps that will try to make the world a little more accessible to all, Johnny went to the farthest reaches of the planet with his daughter Isabel, Jay went on tour with symphony orchestras and Ward continued to play with various pop stars and famous people out of NYC. But when our friend Paul asked us to be a part of a brand-new festival in Charleston, with Cary Ann and Michael and Slow Runner and Lucius and the Avetts and even Chicago friend JD McPherson… we couldn’t say “no”. And then of course, we couldn’t just play one show, could we? So the week before the High Water Festival in Charleston, we’ll hit some of the places we missed last December, and return to our beloved Atlanta (and Evan’s new home).

“Will the shows be different from last time?” people have asked. And they might possibly be! I know that personally I do not expect to enter the hospital with a collapsed lung right before we start tour, so for me that’ll be a happy difference - expect more shimmying and shaking, ’cause that’s what I like to do. And I’m sure that we’ll pick some songs from the catalogue that didn’t make the list last time. A new song, maybe? Too early to tell, ask again later!

What will not be different: our desire to see everyone again! We’re doing this purely because we had one of the best reunion tours a band could ever have had last year, and we know we didn’t get a chance to see everyone in the last couple of weeks of December. We want to remedy that. Hopefully we’ll see some of you again and some of you that we missed. I will continue to hug every neck I am allowed.

We’re going to have a great time together: Democrats, Republicans, Liberals, Conservatives, all religions, all races, all abilities, all nationalities, all genders. This Jump Community is the perfect example of how everyone can be together lovingly, and by golly, we’re going to out-hippie some hippies with all the love in April.

I’m [still, always] so Thankful for you all, and so excited that you’re coming to our shows. I’ll write again soon!

-Matt B of JLC

Thank you for all the kind things y’all said about the first half of this post. I’m glad I’m finally getting around to writing this. This second half is completely necessary, because I have to thank people that helped to make December happen. And then there is some musings about the future, at the end.

Thank yous? Let’s start with Vance McNabb, our manager/tour-manager. I might have mentioned that it was actually Evan that suggested this reunion a year ago. But it was Vance that made it happen. He actually made it happen. Booked the venues. Got us press. Made sure we had transportation, ways to print merch, sold tickets, came up with ideas of how to find more tickets after they sold out instantly, dealt with our wishy-washy grown-up set-in-ways selves. Then he came out of retirement and tour-managed the fucking tour. Something he swore he’d never do: this is a guy that once had to keep Howie Day from throwing meat on underage girls and all sorts of unsavory folks from destroying things in the name of rock and roll. He’s amazing, we love him.

I baby-sat Vance’s son Chris once, when he was ten. He has grown up to be the sweetest, most easy-going, and hard-working guy, thanks to me (just kidding). It was so great to have Chris on this tour with us, and to handle the merchandise from top to bottom. That’s a full-time gig on the road - maybe not the sexiest gig, but it’s one of the most important.

Herbie Jeffcoat, our one-time front-of-house engineer but monitor engineer on this tour, is a pro. The story is that he had talked to Vance about doing our house sound this time around, but Vance told him that what we really needed was someone we knew and trusted, directly on stage with us. Again, it’s not the most glamorous job, but Vance was right. We needed Herbie on “our side” of things. He’s a friend, and he’s the best.

The guy that did get the job of being our front-house sound guy is named Mitch Vanhoose. We didn’t know him from Adam before the tour. But he came with a sexy pedigree and by all accounts made us sound better than we ever did in the past. And we threw a shit-ton of weird stuff at him. And then we did Dock Street. So, Mitch wins.

One of our oldest and dearest friends, Nathan Baerreis, was asked to be the official tour photographer. We met Nate when he was the part-owner of Charleston’s premier downtown toy store, the Climbing Bear, in 1994. He has always been a formidable-looking guy, and we were kind of nervous when this big dude in a trenchcoat came up to us after a show and asked if we “wanted to play some games in the toy store…you know…after hours”. We didn’t have many friends in Charleston at the time, and figured that if all five of us went there would be safety in numbers. And we are so happy that we did. He has been there for us ever since: Nate has been a manager, a park’n’fly driver, a roadie, a web consultant, a wedding photographer, and one of the truest friends I have. He is also one of the most talented artists I know. In recent years he has been concentrating on photography and it only made sense to have him be the tour photog: he’s incredible. We’ll be posting images from Nate along the way, for sure. They kind of blow my mind. A few.

One thing I was super-proud of this time around is how f’ing dapper everyone looked, on stage. Every single night on stage. There have been some very questionable fashion choices in Jump’s history. And before you chuckle condescendingly as you read this: yes, I am fully aware that most of those questionable choices were made by me.

Whatever. This time around I wanted the band to show a unified front. A more elegant profile. It was important for us to dress our age, but to still look like we could be in a rock and roll band. And one of the coolest things about Jump circa 2015 is that all the other band members were into this idea, as well. In the past, it could be difficult for us to agree on a “uniform”. We knew exactly who we wanted to take on the job: Elise Giannasi, one of Chicago’s best-known fashion bloggers and Evan’s brand new fiancée (as of December!). Luckily for us, she offered to help before we could muster the courage to ask. She went shopping and found the right rock’n’roll gentleman accessories, put together a color palatte that would be simple for five dudes with varying states of fashion sense to pull off, and then was backstage every night to make sure that we looked amazing (and we did…I have seen the pictures). Elise has penned her own thoughts on being on tour with the band. Find it here. Thank you, Elise!!

If you bought a poster on this tour, you have a fellow named Mike Lawson to thank. Not only did his business, Heavy Impression, screenprint the posters by hand - we called on Mike to find us some designers for each poster. I loved them all. If you did, too, here’s how to find them:

Justin Jackson (Nashville, Columbia) consider-creative.com

Liana Lawrance (Charlotte) thisisliana.com

Kat Lamp (Atlanta) katlamp.com

Evan Bivins (Charleston) Bivins Brothers Design & Development and this old gem

And, of course, our incredibly talented and lovely friend Lindsay Windham, who created the gorgeous poster for Dock Street (oliveargyle.com)

By the way, if you missed your chance to get a poster or t-shirt from the tour, Vance would really like me to say that you’ll soon be able to buy some merch on the J,LC site. Hopefully sooner than later, because guess who is in charge of the website? Yep, this slow-poke.

Lauren Duffie designed the lights for every Dock Street Theater show in our history. Eleven times we put her through hell: gave her an inadequate amount of time to do magical things, with practically no budget. And every time, she was able to create an ambiance and added a level of professionalism that a rock band barely deserves. She was the first person we reached out to when we knew we were going to do the show in December; this time we had even less time for her and had to focus more on remembering the music than developing a theme for the night(s), as we usually did. This didn’t deter her or stop her from producing the same magical things we knew she would. We love you, Duffie.

There are others to thank. Our girlfriends and wives and children for being as supportive as always…one thing I got a kick out of when talking to fans is how many people thanked our families. “Thank them for giving you permission to go on the road!”, you said. I loved that. The Medical University of South Carolina for taking such good care of me and letting me out of the hospital in time to get to the first show in Atlanta. Chris Russell of the Dock Street, who wasn’t scheduled to work during this holiday but did anyway (we’re super-glad he did, because being there wouldn’t have been the same without him). The boys, our brothers that opened up for us (that I mentioned in the previous post). The Venues: Terminal West, Visulite Theatre, Exit Inn, both Music Farms.

We are grateful to so many people. And especially you, of course. Especially you.

So I did it! Done and done! Post Mortem properly posted! Now the only question is: what is next?

And I don’t have an answer. I can say that we have talked about it, a little. We have thought about it, a lot. It’s a bit tricky…on the one hand we know that the success of this tour was purely possible by the “sentimental” factor: people came to see us because it was a reunion. This only works once in a decade, probably. I think that if we were to play again before the next ten year mark, we’d have to provide something new, right? A new song, a new EP, a new album. Or a special set of songs played in a unique setting: with a symphony orchestra, perhaps, or at a summer festival.

Nothing is set right now. We know that we don’t want to be in a rock band again, full-time. We want anything we work on together to be special. We don’t want to forget again why we started this band in the first place: because we were friends that loved working together, creating music together, having fun. After a while, other stuff got in the way, and we lost track of why we were working so hard. Right now we have all jumped straight back into our “regular” lives, back into our comfort zones of teaching and writing and gigging and nerding. we’re all open to seeing what could happen in the world of Jump, Little Children.