Interview: Jake Ward, aka Jaek Wrad

Jake Ward, aka Jaek Wrad (right)

I spend a lot of time talking about the arts on this blog, but most of the works I discuss are by faraway, almost abstract people I have never talked to in real life. I mean, I'd love to be best buds with Björk, but that's just not the hand life's dealt me. However, I do know a lot of people who are artists in some capacity: musicians, poets, fiction writers, painters, etc. This raises the question of why I don't talk about these folks and their work on my blog. So I'm trying something new here. I'm going to start what I hope will become a recurring feature in which I interview my artist friends. And now you're reading the first one!

Bear with me; I've never conducted a formal interview before, so this may be a mess. If it is a mess, that's my own lack of experience showing; my friends are vibrant, intelligent people who have lots of interesting things to say. And my good friend Jake Ward is the first one to brave my greenhorn interview skills. Thanks, Jake!

I've known Jake Ward for almost six years. We were in the same graduate cohort in the University of Tennessee at Knoxville's master's program in English Literature and Creative Writing. He lives in Indianapolis now with his wife, Emily, but we still keep in touch, which speaks to how nifty this guy is; I am rarely dedicated enough to keep in touch with someone long-distance.

Jake's day job is as a high school English teacher, but by night, he is a multi-instrumentalist musician who goes by the moniker "Jaek Wrad" on the mean streets of the internet. He has one album out, which you can hear over at his Bandcamp page; he's also currently working on a crazy-ambitious stage musical based on the life of King David from the Bible. We talk about all this and more in the interview. He's a very cool cat, and I hope you enjoy reading this interview as much as I enjoyed conducting it.


Interview

Michael: So tell me the story of “Jaek Wrad.”

Jake: It’s not that good of a story, I don’t think. When I was in high school, my girlfriend was like, “You have to get a Facebook. It’d be so cool, and you’re going to college.” She was a year behind me, and so she wasn’t going to college. I was being immature and stubborn and being like, “No, I’m not going to get it.” My sister had said Facebook wasn’t cool. The cool thing was MySpace; that’s what all the cool people did. I don’t know why I didn’t want a Facebook, but it just seemed like a cultural trend that I wanted to fight. But I got one very reluctantly and hastily, and I typed my name in wrong.

M: [laughs] Both your first and last names?

J: No, I only did the “Jaek,” but then I was like, “Oops, who cares?” and submitted it anyway. It stayed like that a long time. I think until I got married, which would have been about six years. Then [my wife] Emily made me change it back. I think at some point in those six years, I decided, “If I spelled my last name differently, too, it sounds like ‘rad.’ I don’t know why I thought it was cool, but I just did it, and even I was aware that this was kind of stupid. But I just left it.

M: Were you ever on MySpace?

J: I did have a MySpace. I just never really did anything with it because you could customize the background and do all these other features, and I didn’t know how to do them, and I didn’t want to take the time to do them. It just didn’t seem worth my time. So I didn’t do it. [laughs]

M: So you didn’t put music on MySpace or anything like that?

J: No, I didn’t have any music at that time. As far as stuff I played back then, it would just be covers, so I didn’t post any of that, or anyone else’s music either.

M: So speaking of which, your music--you’ve just released the one album, right? And it’s on Bandcamp?

J: Yes.

M: Cool. So what’s your take on where music distribution is right now?

J: As far as my personal choices, I still like CDs. I’ve made some exceptions on Bandcamp for things that were only digital but that I thought sounded cool. But I do like CDs. I just bought five CDs at a library book sale last night. It’s kind of stupid, because I’ll still end up putting them on my computer and then putting them on my phone so that I always have them, like streaming, but I want to own the physical thing because I’m paranoid about losing something that Amazon or Apple gave me. If I like it a lot, then I want to own it.

M: What do you think is different about owning it? Is it just that some corporation could take it away?

J: Well, part of it is that even though I have a lot of CDs, I still have a limited number of CDs, and I can focus on those. I guess I could do this on Spotify, too, and it might happen more naturally, where I would just listen to the things I remember to listen to over and over again. But if I own the CD, it’ll be in my car, and I’ll listen to it three or four times at least before I put another CD in there. I like that. I think I just get overwhelmed when there are too many choices. There are nights when Emily’s not here, and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I could watch anything,” and I sit there and scroll through all the Netflix options for long enough that I just get tired of dealing with it, and I end up reading a book instead because I can’t make up my mind. It’s a serious problem sometimes. It’s the same reason I like to go to the library and rent some movies, or sometimes I’ll go to Family Video, because we still have one of those [Editorial Update: in the time between the conducting of this interview and its publication, Jake’s Family Video announced that it would be closing]. If I know that I only have four days to watch it, it just makes the decision for you, and it’s a lot less emotionally trying. I think that’s part of why I like having the CDs. I also just like the idea of libraries. I own a lot of books because I just like seeing them on the shelf. Maybe it’s just consumerism.

M: On the subject of libraries, you and I both have graduate degrees in English from the University of Tennessee, and you studied philosophy as an undergraduate, right?

J: Yeah. I always feel like I’m not qualified to say I majored in philosophy, but yes, I was a philosophy student.

M: Is your academic background something you draw on when you’re making music?

J: I’m sure what I’ve read and studied affects how I perceive what I’m doing. I don’t consciously know that I’m drawing on any art theories or literary critical theories with what I’m writing. I do think with a lot of what I’ve read of fiction and literary criticism, what little I do know, does influence the way I understand what’s happening when I’m writing something and thinking about what listeners are going to pick up and think about. Music is still a pretty different situation from fiction, though.

M: What would you say are the big foundations that you’re drawing on that aren’t literary?

J: Well, before I answer that, I do want to say that you can probably tell that I had an interest in philosophy because of my approach to music. I’m really interested in deeper meaning, and sometimes I have trouble just telling a story that is a nice story that makes you feel something, that has some life in it. That’s what most of the art I like does. But when I’m making something, I feel like I have to put in this layer of understanding about what’s at the foundation of the world, what undergirds reality for me, and there has to be some formal plan for the music, and it has to make sense in my head. But I’ve also been fighting that, because when I get down to it, when I listen to music, I just want it to sound good. So I’m fighting myself in a way. But that’s how you can probably tell that I was interested in philosophy. I just read Gödel, Escher, Bach. Have you heard of that book?

M: I don’t think I know anything about it except the title.

J: I had no idea what it was about before I read it either. But the author talks about bringing Bach into these formal systems. He’s a computer science guy working on artificial intelligence. I think that’s been affecting me lately.

M: The next question I have is about your first album, which is on Bandcamp: Draw, Jaek. That album is fairly lyrically intense in the sense that the way your lyrics work, they don’t lend themselves to conventional storytelling like you were talking about. Your songs don’t really follow verse-chorus-verse structure and things like that. If you look at the lyrics on the page, they have the feel of written poetry rather than song lyrics. You’ve already said a little bit about this, but what’s your songwriting process? How do lyrics and music intersect?

J: I don’t really have one process, and I feel like I’m still working out what my process should be. In the past, I’ve just been going for a walk or I’m in my car and I just think of something that I think is an interesting idea, and I’ll write it down, so I’ll end up with all these tiny one-sentence things in my notebook. Sometimes they end up longer, and I’ll sometimes write a few stanzas in one sitting, and those will be the ones that I feel like I can actually use, as opposed to the one-sentence ones where I’m like, “This is a cool sentence, but I don’t know how to extend it.” And then I’ll try to extend it, and I’ll be like, “No, this sucks. I’m not interested in this.” When I try to consciously control that, it doesn’t end up working super well, which frustrates me a lot. You hear people say, “You just gotta work hard, you gotta sit down every day as a writer and just write.” I try that, too, and sometimes I can develop what I worked on the previous day. But a lot of times, I’ll just have this kernel of a cool idea that I can’t seem to develop into anything I’m happy about, and I feel like I just ruin it when I impose on it. I have a hard time getting to music. I think what usually happens is I just have all these things written in my notebook, and then I have all these musical things I’ve been working with, like my looper pedal, where I’ll just play something random that I think sounds cool. So whatever two things I happen to be working on at the same time, I’ll just try them out with each other and see which ones work. That’s often all it is.

M: So on your music--what instruments do you actually play?

J: I started my musical path with the violin in 7th grade. I learned piano; I’m not great at piano, but I can play it. I play guitar. I own a banjo--I don’t think that’s on the album. I think that’s it. If there are any drums [on the album], I just programmed them in on Garage Band. I don’t own a drum set, though I’ve always wanted to.

M: If you were going to add another instrument to your repertoire, what would it be? Is it drums?

J: I dunno. Drums would be really cool, but I don’t have a place in my house for drums, and I’m sure Emily would hate us having a drum set. That’s a logistical problem. Until I get to the point where I have a studio, it’s just not convenient to use drums. I don’t know what my next instrument would be. Honestly, I just got this Moog semimodular synthesizer, which I’m super fascinated with. I’m fascinated by synthesizer sounds, so I’m trying to learn how to use this better. So that’s probably my instrument.

M: Okay, here’s a typical interview question: who’s influencing you?

J: Musically, especially on that last album, Sufjan Stevens is just an enormous influence on me. For so many things that he did, I was at the right age at the right time that I just latched onto his techniques. There’s something kind of magical about his layered tracks.

M: He’s got a lot of different styles. Is there a particular Sufjan that is most impactful to you?

J: On my album, it was the Illinois album. “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades,” that song has a couple different vocal tracks, almost in a round, and there are little lines of strings and a drum, and just all this different stuff happening. When I use the word “magical,” I’m talking about songs like that. I don’t know that I got to that energy level, but I like that idea of multiple lines that are intertwined.

M: He’s got a whole ensemble, whereas you’re a one-man show.

J: Yeah, I’ve never really worked with other people. I’ve always wanted to, especially now that I’m married and have a job and my friends are married and/or live far away and have kids. It would be cool to have a team. I don’t know, though. I feel like I’m really deferential, like, “Whatever you guys want to do.” I would have strong opinions, but I would have a hard time working them in, and I would just be frustrated all the time.

M: Anyway, I cut you off about your influences.

J: Well, as far as Sufjan goes, one of the things that drew me to him is that he usually is doing so many different things, whereas on my album, I probably am only doing one thing. Right now, after the album, I’m worried that whenever I try to do something new, it’ll just be the same thing that I’ve always done, so I’m trying hard to do different harmonies and use different strategies. Besides Sufjan Stevens, I feel like whatever I’m listening to or reading has a big impact on me. Like I said, that Gödel, Escher, Bach book made me want to write a fugue, because that’s what Bach does, and I tried to do that; I wrote simple one that I put into a song as part of a first movement of something that I’m working on.

M: Hey, you’ve got a Moog synthesizer. Maybe you’re just Emerson, Lake & Palmer. What are you listening to right now, since that influences you?

J: When I went to the record store the other day, I got an album by Brian Eno. Another Green World.

M: I think David Foster Wallace really liked that one.

J: So I had just read Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself.

M: Is that the book that was adapted into The End of the Tour?

J: Yeah. I read that in two days. It’s just a transcript of David Lipsky and David Foster Wallace talking. It’s basically like watching the movie, without having to consider whether Jason Segel is doing a good job of being DFW. But anyway, I devoured that. And he just mentions Another Green World once, just a song from that album, and I thought, “I should listen to more Brian Eno,” because I had just heard some of his ambient stuff, which was interesting, but I think I like a little more clear structure and songiness. So I’ve listened to that a bunch of times, because it’s in my car now. I also bought Devo’s first album, Are We Not Men? I learned a cover of one of the songs the other day and played it at an open mic.

M: To the extent that you post on Facebook, it seems like you’re doing a lot of open mic and live music.

J: I’ve been trying to go every week. That helps me stay a little grounded and makes me keep playing my guitar. It’s really easy for me to not practice my instrument, since I’m more interested in making things than in just being a performer. Performing is what I hated about studying music, just going to violin lessons and having to practice this Mozart concerto a thousand times. So it’s good if I force myself to play an instrument and put into my fingers stuff that other people have written, to get a sense of it. It also just gets me out there playing in front of people. Even though it’s usually just the same two old guys who are there, who are awesome, and then a bunch of strangers who are usually pretty ambivalent about the fact that they showed up on open mic night.

M: So your next project that I know you’re working on is that you’re creating a stage musical, and obviously that has a live component, or you’re at least anticipating one. How’s that different from your first album, which was conceived as studio music?

J: I don’t know if I currently intend for it ever to be a live performance [laughs]. I’m basically just stealing everything I’ve heard about Hamilton. Lin-Manuel Miranda said he’d just planned on it being a concept album, and that’s basically all I have in mind: to have a story that’s already been told, so I don’t have to come up with the plot and figure out what happens. I obviously still have to be creative in what I draw out of that story, but I just wanted a big story that I could just dive into and not worry about the foundation, so I could just focus on the music and the way I told the story. My intention is that I would have other people and voice the parts, but that’s about as ambitious as I was intending to be with it.

M: So would you consider this project any different from Pink Floyd’s The Wall or any of the really famous narrative concept albums?

J: I would say I’m basically doing that. The Wall is cool in that if you just listened to the album and didn’t watch the movie, it’s a little more subtle and more inventive and concise in how it tells the story compared to what I’ve been doing. I don’t think I’m doing it as well as The Wall. Mine is a lot more linear. But otherwise, I would say that yeah, I just consider it a concept album. I love music that tells stories, even though I’m not as good at writing the stories. I’m trying to help that by taking a story that already exists and telling that story.

M: Speaking of the story, it’s about King David in the Bible, right? It’s an adaptation of the books of Samuel in the Bible, right?

J: Yes.

M: Why that particular story?

J: Every story has something important and meaningful. There are a thousand stories out there that I could have picked that I would have had something meaningful to say about, but I feel like there’s some urge in me to go to the bottom of some sort of foundational, most-important story in my mind, and in the Bible, this one is pretty central. I’ve grown up with the sense that the Bible is foundational in this important way. We didn’t grow up going to church, but it always seemed like the book, and in some sense the story, with David as a type of Christ. I’m probably just being pretentious, but I just felt that if I’m going to devote myself to this, shouldn’t it be something that really matters, and not just some story that really grabbed me and then two days later I didn’t care about anymore?

M: What’s it like adapting the Bible? You and I are both practicing Christians, so obviously, we both have long histories with the story, which makes it a little bit different than, say, adapting a novel.

J: It’s been weird. Part of it is trying to make it not written in Christian code. I’m trying to reach an audience that isn’t just Christian. It’s been a challenge because I’m adapting the Bible, and one way or another, people are coming with a lot of preconceived notions, so I’m trying to fight against those a little bit. I don’t think I changed anything [from the Bible] too much, though. I think I’ve been pretty loyal to my understanding of the Bible. There is a lot of stuff that I just jettisoned because it was just too much, but I don’t feel like that’s changing the heart of the story. At least not in a blasphemous sense. There are certain verses or phrases or descriptions of David that are in the Bible multiple times or that have become iconic that I wanted to hit. I’m trying to think of what those are right now.

M: Well, David and Goliath.

J: Yeah, but I guess I was thinking more word phrases that I’m trying to tap into and draw out musically. But yeah, those stories where you know that people are going to know that story already, too. There’s some cultural knowledge you can tap into, which can be helpful. But that’s not because it’s just the Bible; it’s because it’s David and Goliath.

M: Does any of that feel restrictive? For example, you talk about people coming with preconceived notions, and the Bible is so weighted with literal history and also personal and cultural histories for people. Do you worry about adapting it because of how that baggage may interplay with how people react to your music?

J: I’m not sure. You mean that someone might peg me as someone who writes Christian music or something?

M: That, but also, people have been told the David and Goliath story since they were three or whatever, so there’s a particular version of that story that’s cemented in people’s minds because of how ubiquitous it became in culture, rather than what the source text is. I just feel like there are a lot of ways in which the Bible has become so ubiquitous that it has all these narratives and implications put on it that you have to navigate when you go back to the source text.

J: I feel like I haven’t been very aware of what everybody thinks this story means when I’ve been doing this project. Maybe that’s more of a result of ignorance on my part. I’ve grown up with the stories, but I don’t have a sense of hearing other people talk about the stories, except, you know, David and Goliath. I’ve just gone with what moved me in the story and what seemed important or interesting to me in the story. And honestly, if I came out of this with a straightforward, boring telling of the story but that was fun to listen to, I think I would say it was a huge success [laughs]. My goal would be that plotwise, it was engaging and interesting and dramatically moving. But… I mean, I started out trying to write fiction. That’s what I wanted to do, but I always felt like I was terrible at it. I just immediately hated everything I wrote, I felt like I had no idea what to do, I didn’t know how to tell a story. But there’s something about music where I at least know some things about how this is formally supposed to work. I’ve heard enough music that I know what a song sounds like and when I want something to sound like a song. And if it sounds like a song that’s fun to listen to, I did something, at least.

M: You mentioned earlier as being pegged as a Christian artist. And there are a lot of Christian artists out there, most visibly with the commercial worship scene, contemporary Christian music, and that sort of thing. Your music’s not that, at least not the way it sounds. I think a lot of people who didn’t grown up with Christian music tend to dislike that music anyway. But are there Christian musicians out there that are interesting to you?

J: I know I listened to Relient K a lot when I was in high school. They were a band that it was cool to like in high school, and some of their later stuff I think is really good. I think they’re better than some of the Christian music out there.

M: Are they still making music? I’ve not kept up with Relient K at all.

J: They had an album [Collapsible Lung] where they moved in a really poppy direction, and maybe they were already doing this, but I heard there was somebody else writing their songs on that album. I don’t know why that was a big deal to me, because they were already making poppy songs. But there was something funny and quirky about them that I felt was getting smoothed over to make them more commercially appealing. You know, some hipster reason about how they “sold out” or whatever. I listened to that album once, and it was like, “This is okay.” Probably says more about me than them. Anyway, my only other answer is Sufjan again. I have heard him say that he doesn’t think music or his public presentation of music is a place for him to discuss his faith--in some sort of proselytizing sense, is what I think he meant. That made a lot of sense to me, but also, I always think that you can’t help but let that into your music. This has been said by a couple people before, but if you are a Christian and you are making art, then that is what Christian art is; it doesn’t have to be a praise song that would be sung in church for it to be Christian. So in that sense, I’m interested in a lot of what Sufjan does through the lens of him being a Christian who did this. And maybe it’s not always about his faith, but at least it was something important to him. I don’t even know what denomination he is or how important his faith is to him at this point in his life, but I think at least in some songs, his faith comes out.

M: In Illinois, he’s got some songs that are explicit about that.

J: Oh yeah, especially earlier. There’s that Seven Swans album. And in The Age of Adz, that last song, “Impossible Soul,” which is like 25 minutes long, works pretty well as an allegory for our relationship as humans, who are sinful, with God. I listened to that a lot of times before it occurred to me that maybe that had any religious meaning, but when it did, I thought that was cool because it wasn’t overtly about that. It was just a good song, but it could also mean something to me on that religious level about my relationship with God. I don’t know if he intended that, but it does mean something to me now.

You can listen to / buy Jake's first album, Draw, Jaek, at his Bandcamp page and follow him on Facebook here.