Week One: Jesse Sample’s Freak of the Week “Take a Breath”

Jesse Sample’s Freak of the Week airs EVERY WEDNESDAY at 6pm EASTERN only on RadioRadioX.com

This is Jesse Sample. There is a thing about this weekly project I do. I move through my year, and I record at least on song a week. Sometimes, I’m thrilled with what I come up with and sometimes it doesn’t blow my mind. I have my initial thoughts about the composition and those thoughts can change. But I don’t often spend a ton of time obsessing over last weeks composition. Yes, there’s been times where I play a song over and over 200 times while I’m out walking in the park. But by the time I’m finished with a composition, it’s usually time to start the next one.

At the end of the year, I take all my recordings and master them into one huge album. I name this last year’s album, “Freak of the Week 2025” the same as last year’s, except the number. When I’m preparing this giant album, I listen to all the songs in order many times, to make sure everything is right.  These are some of the first times that I actually listen to these songs in the context of an album. The project reveals itself to me. I’m left with an impression as though it was another artist who made this.

After the album is complete, I find myself in the first week of January with a head full of ideas and chest full of ambition. I want to come rippin’ out of the gates with a fire breathing masterpiece complete with tripled tracked guitar solos and multi-tiered movements. Last year, I was still running hot on the fumes of a punk show that I saw that changed my playing. I stepped into the new year with a million thing I wanted to do, musically and personally. There came a point where it was overwhelming. I didn’t notice part of me that was thinking I was going to reconfigure my life on January 1^st.

But much like this weekly project, life is about process. Every day, not just New Year’s Day, we sit before the blank page or the empty Logic project and we make our move, and then we make another, and we react it and soon something is forming that we couldn’t predict but it’s made of us and we can choose to love it. I’d like this new year to be about considering the process that truly defines my days. Maybe I’ll lay off the candy and the Instagram scrolling and approach my minutes and hours as an artist approaches a question or a problem. I could ditch my pride and enter the abstract like a newly minted kindergartener, in music and in my life in general.

Thanks to all of you tuned into RadioRadioX. This is the Freak of the Week, “Take a Breath.”