I knew you wanted to get to know 21-year-old Jakob Johnson, The Record Life. better. So, here goes!
Jakob was introduced to music early in life by his father, who he would go on road trips with accompanied by a mixtape soundtrack consisting of The Beatles, Lynyrd Skynard, The Eagles, Led Zeppelin, Green Day, and Social Distortion. “I really grew to love the melodies within the music,” he says. By the time Jake was 7, he was a member of the Central Phoenix based choir, touring here in the states and internationally.
“We sang a huge variety of stuff from early American soul songs to classical songs that were hundreds of years old and entirely in Latin, but they were always a cappella, and they always had six-part harmonies,” he says.
Here’s the fascinating story behind The Record Life’s debut album, Into the Sea of Something Big:
A while back, Jakob (or Jake as he’s often called) met a woman on MySpace who claimed she was a professional snowboarder and a fan of his music, offering him a place to stay in L.A., then supposedly suffering a series of mishaps, including losing both her parents, getting into a near-fatal car accident, claiming she was raped and losing her house. Despite his own friends’ skepticism, Johnson found himself falling in love with the voice on the other end of the telephone, until he discovered, quite by coincidence, that the pictures she had been sending him were of a college student at New York City’s Loyola Marymount. And for the girl he had fallen in love with, she actually lived in North Carolina and wasn’t a snowboarder at all!
“She did a number on me,” laughs Jake. “At least 11 of them. And there just so happens to be 11 songs on the record. Go figure.”
From the first falling in love (Got Me Good), to feeling the shock of hearing about the car crash (Head in My Hands) to the realization she wasn’t who she said she was (Not the Same) and the vow to walk away (Write This Down), Johnson pours his heart into his strange tale of love lost, found and lost again on MySpace, Facebook and iChat, a true, 21st century romance.
“I want to let everyone know, as dark as it gets, it’s gonna get light again one day,” Jake says of the experiences that led to the recording. “Everything’s gonna be alright. I’ve been through some serious emotional turmoil. I thought nothing could ever get worse, but it did – over and over and over and over again. It can get bad, but I promise it will get better. Just keep your head up. It will turn out OK.”
On the epic “My Lover, the Floodlight,” with its tribal drums and keyboard plunking, Johnson admits he was listening to Death Cab for Cutie when he wrote the song, “My interpretation of how a perfect relationship with my ideal would feel, just being with a smart girl who is as good-looking as she is intellectual.”
In the end, though, for Jake Johnson and The Record Life, it’s all about the song.
“If there’s a part that doesn’t make the whole song better, then it comes out,” he explains. “If there was a single goal on the album, it was to showcase these songs the way they deserve, and not let anything get in the way. Even it it’s the most ‘get-you-off’ musical part ever.”
For the sequel to The Record Life’s Into the Sea of Something Big, Jake is ready to take the show on the road, hopefully to a town near you.
“More than anything, I’m looking forward to playing these songs live,” he says, with videos of his performances already available at www.youtube.com/therecordlifemusic.
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