Justin Scalera, Jake Feldman, and Alaric Azeez have been playing in bands since before they could remember. These childhood friends have been bound to music dating back to their High School days and now, they’ve taken on a new project titled “Whiskey Jones and the Dead Seas”. Each member of the band goes by a different alias when playing on stage with Jake being Danger Adams, Alaric being Ron Zapato, and Justin leading the tribe as Whiskey Jones.
“I call myself Whiskey Jones, but I’m not Whiskey Jones” Justin says in an attempt to make sense of the cinematic nature of the project “Whiskey Jones is a man that existed in the dawn of the industrial revolution; he’s a grave runner. He’s a man of no time and no place; he’s lived many lives and this is the one that’s now. Back in the day, he was part of a rag tag group of drifters called the Dead Seas and they made some music. Some of those songs exist now, but we’ve also written new ones”.
The world that Whiskey Jones has created is one that’s fiction but rooted in reality; something that is portrayed through their on stage performance as well as the songs that they’ve written.
“We wanted to be more than just music on stage, we wanted to be an experience.” Jake explains “We wanted to create something different. It’s gonna be like an expanded universe, so more than just music; the music is gonna be a way to convey ideas and meanings and stories but we’re gonna do things outside of music that you can follow and connect with that’ll be very interesting and rewarding. It’s more than just the music”.
“As much as it is a music project, it’s also a whole art project” Justin adds “We want it to be more material, that’s why we use a lot of analog stuff when doing this. We don’t have social media, most of the stuff we’ve done with this project is paper (referring to a set of postcards the band handed out at their first show). As for the stage set up, we have old TV’s that we play video on during our set and all of that footage is shot on random cameras from 1995 and earlier. We like to incorporate older technologies and older equipment like the TV’s and radios; I even sing into an old phone!”
Alaric then chimed in, “we really like to have that lost and found, rag tag kind of vibe”. And lost and found vibe do they have! Their music is one that creates a story. Justin writes most of their lyrics and using his artistic background, transforms them into a mystical fantasy land with themes from real life that almost all could relate to.
“If you listen to the versus it’s more of a background story, but then in the chorus it’s the main theme that anybody really can connect to. We have a song called “Afterlife” and if you listen to it, it’s about is this guy going out in the world to find this girl that he lost but it turns out this girl is dead and is now possessed by a grim reaper type character. The chorus is sort of the realization this man has that this person is going to kill him, but if anybody is going to kill him, he wants it to be her. It’s a weird human feeling that more people can connect with but there’s also the fantasy element of it”
Still not completely sold? Jake explained their music further by saying “it’s kind of like the Odyssey where it’s a long winded story but there are a lot of interesting parts to it that connect overall. We want to try and do things that other artists haven’t completely tried or done. We want to make music the focus of all of it but we also want to try and do things that feel new. We want to do things that involve the audience and make it a participation rather than just a show”
So what makes this project different from the ones they’ve done in the past? “It has a little more of a focus” Jake explains “we’re very early on in the process and we have a lot of ideas that are still gonna come up. The concept of where we want all of this to go is gonna be really big”
“Our sound has sort of a haunted element to it, kind of folk rocky” Justin chimed in “It’s a much more unique and mature sounding as opposed to our old bands which were primarily pop-punk music. It’s honestly pretty unique because of all of our backgrounds in music. I listen to a ton of indie folk music, Jake is in a hard rock band, and Alaric has his own music taste.”
“Our sound is very adaptive” Alaric spoke up, “we use lots of unorthodox instruments! We have a suitcase, with a tom drum inserted into it with a cymbal. We have this wind chime from Justin’s backyard, a flamingo holding a triangle, and another suitcase taped onto it”
When asked about the future, all three of them had the same idea; to take Whiskey Jones as far as they could until they got tired of it. “It’s nice to do it. For me (Justin), it’s been a long time since I’ve played in a band, which was in 2015. Me and Alaric were never in a band together so it’s nice to finally be able to do something real with our jam sessions”.
“It would be cool to play with the music while traveling but we don’t have any massive goals yet” Jake chimed in, the other two nodding in unison at the idea “We want to get a single out soon just so that when people ask what we sound like we can send them something. We have demo’s that sound pretty good but they’re not finished recordings or anything. Right now, we just want to do it”.
After four years of college keeping these friends apart, Whiskey Jones is a creative outlet they can share again. The band will be playing their second show together at Cupa Cafe in Watchung, NJ this Friday January 3rd. They will be the first of many local artists featured monthly at the cafe. You can find more information about Friday’s show on Facebook. To receive a postcard from Whiskey Jones, please fill out this form: https://forms.gle/WsNHHahhkZ6iePyr5.