Jeffrey Gaines – An Xperience Interview

Jeffrey Gaines – An Xperience Interview – by Liam Sweeny.

RRX: I read an interview with you from a while back in Boston Beats, and you had a lot of good insights, your take on music and growing up. You noted that basically everything’s either music or uses music like, for example, cartoons. So we grow up around music all the time and we don’t always realize it. So what sparked you to enter this universal current of music as opposed to just being passive in it?

JG: If you’re that young; if my reference is cartoons, I’m in the single digits. I’m a child. I’m just looking around at Earth. Like it’s just “welcome to Earth, figure it out. It’s gonna be a wild ride.” So that being said, I’m grabbing this, you know, at the end of the 60s and uh the 70s where music is Jesus Christ Superstar. In order to tell the Jesus story, they had to use a musical, like they’re going to sing the Bible to you now. And kids know the alphabet because of the song associated with it. If not for melody, no one would remember anything. so it’s just so cool and you just say, ‘well this is the source.’

I’m a bad student. Everybody’s looking for what they’re gonna do or become to survive in the world, to get all the things they’ll need. I just feel like, for me, I’m one of these. people that admits very, very openly that it’s about aptitude. For instance, Shaquille O’Neal plays basketball because he’s 7 ft tall. You know what I mean? It’s like, why did you pick basketball? So I looked around and said, what are my abilities and skill sets and I followed those things. I sing a lot, and it’s like, ‘oh my God, that sounds just like the record or it sounds just like the thing.’ I don’t know why that is, but if that’s being pointed out to me by so many other people who happen to hear it, just as I’m happening to hear it and then other people are saying ‘you should do that, and you should do that, and you should do that. I’m like, right, I probably should do that.

RRX: You’re very well known for creating an acoustic version of Peter Gabriel’s In Your Eyes, and you do other covers for your sets, and on the local level at least, there’s a debate or separation between originals and covers, and some are solidly on one or the other side. Uh, do you think that doing covers brings attention to the originals?

JG: Throughout a show, the thing that’s weird about it is that the cover kind of works in the live application more so than anything else. In the live application, “In Your Eyes” started for me when I was opening up for Tom Petty and Heartbreakers. It was kind of sprung out of a lot of the countries we were playing; the language barrier, like English wasn’t their first language. We’re playing in Germany, in Paris and, You know, and all these Scandinavian countries and stuff. The English isn’t the first language, so Tom Petty could play Germany because he’s got hit songs, you know what I mean? And everybody knows those hit songs from MTV and all that, and the radio and everything. They’re playing American music. If you’re a star. But me, they’re like, “you’re really good. Uh, I like what I’m hearing, but I’m missing some of the vocal content. I know you can sing, you play, I’m digging you and stuff like that. And I’m like, man, you know, 8 songs in it’s pretty great, and the band was watching from the stage and it’s coming to the end of the set and I kinda wanna have an experience that’s beyond what I played

So “In Your Eyes” is sort of just like one of my girlfriend’s songs, and she asked me like, “Oh, you sound good singing this.” So I’m looking to my girlfriend and I played it to her a couple of times and like she’s like, “yeah, that’s it.” And then I record it and it’s out. And then it went nuts. And it became the way I would say thank you and good night.

RRX: So there’s that night, you’re in the club, you got your A game on, and as you’re getting off the stage, guy in a suit comes up from the back and gives you his card. Were you elated? Suspicious? If this isn’t what actually happened, what does being discovered feel like the minute it hits or even the hour later?

JG: Some part of you is sort of confirmed, and again this is like a long time ago. I don’t believe it even happens that way anymore. I just noticed nowadays, the only place that still happens is television, they televise the NFL draught and these college guys, they televised them getting signed by one of the majors and they can go play pro ball. Music used to in a sense have that kind of thing where you’d be a really good band, you’d do really good regionally, and then if everything went cool, you could get signed to Columbia Records or something like that or Sony or Epic or, you know, BMI Records and that was the differentiating thing. It’s like after Thanksgiving, I think probably everybody in America, people go out and they play football in the yard. And I think the same thing for music. Every college dorm you go into, there’s probably a guitar, some acoustic guitar with 4 strings on it in the corner of the room. So everybody can play some songs and play some music. But they used to be like, “but you were signed. You, you made it to the NFL or the NBA or the RCA. You know, and you could walk around on a little bit of a cloud saying holy shit, better buckle down. We’re not kidding anymore.

It’s kind of good on the one hand, but also, as you get it, you’re also creating those separations that you’re not creating, but the whole status of that thing that’s been pinned upon you, creates separations amongst your little peer group because you say, “well, if there’s 27 of us that we all know each other at the same basement parties and at the same little VFW gigs that we’re putting flyers on the cars in the parking lot and spreading the word by friend, by friend by friend, everybody, we all think we’re all the same level of good. And then it’s like, you start to maybe hear through the grapevine, Hey, did you hear fucking Jeffrey Gaines got a record deal? So immediately a lot of people who maybe have put a lot of time in, maybe there’s older guys in that same circle put a lot more years in, and they’re wondering “what the hell’s he got that I don’t got and why did that happen to him?” And so you find out immediately that you’re not gonna be able to control the narrative anymore.

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