Talent Crush: Jamie Woon
Intro
JAMIE WOON: Hey, how are you doing?
KELLY KORZUN: Long time no see, right? It’s only been a week since our impromptu brunch in Warsaw, but it feels like it happened in another life. I’m excited about this new season of interviews, and it’s an honor to kick it off with yours. Also, I really appreciate all the beautiful things you’ve said about METAL & DVST last time we talked. The fact that you saw it for what it is, referring to it as a labor of love, means a lot to me. This decade-long labor of love journey started around the time you stepped away from the music industry, which makes your long-awaited comeback feel very nostalgic. How was the rest of the tour?
JW: It was great. I’ve been really enjoying it so far, especially playing live with the band. It feels much less complicated now, very simple in a good way, which hasn’t always been the case in the past. There’s something special about returning to something you love after such a long time – it’s amazing to feel like I’m developing something again in the live arena and reconnecting with that part. With all that time away, you almost forget what it’s like.
KK: Sometimes the best thing you can do is to learn everything there is about a subject matter and then forget it overnight so that it doesn’t penetrate your conscious mind too much. A mind of a monk and a heart of a child, to quote one of your songs. The freedom that comes with unlearning and starting fresh is what keeps things exciting. The creative adult is the child who survived.
JW: Absolutely. I got to miss it, but also I got to forget that I was missing it.
KK: Spirits was the first tune I heard about 15 years ago, and, three LPs later, the theme of spirituality is still prevailing. There’s also this sense of deep connection with nature and its elements. Growing up in London, where do you think this relationship with nature began?
JW: Interesting. Growing up in the city and living in the residential environment, my relationship with nature likely began with going to the park, seeing the trees, the birds, exploring the world around you. And, of course, spending time in Malaysia as a kid and being exposed to a completely different environment allowed me to experience this connection on a deeper level. I think the reason why nature is often referenced in my music is because of my early introduction to folk music through my mother. Folk music connects you to the past, the present, to others around you, it’s very collective. Nature is what remained the same throughout evolution. The trees, the sea, the sky, all these words bring up a lot of other associations, they are the sources of our most potent symbols and metaphors, and because of that potency, these images can be boring, but it’s nice to use them sometimes because they don’t stick out too much.
KK: One of the things that I appreciate about nature is that it has cycles, and the older I get, the more I embrace the cyclical nature of everything in life, which oftentimes gets overlooked in the world where everything around us suggests that we always need to keep our dopamine level high. You and I grew up at a different time, with more time on our hands and way less distractions, and we had to find ways to occupy ourselves, to foster our innate curiosity, to go outside, to explore, to pick up a pen, a guitar, to do something with that slow-moving river of time. Nature helps you realize the importance of patience and slowing down – nothing in nature blooms all year. Connecting with the nature reminds us how small we really are in the grand scheme of things.
JW: Yes, and you can get the same feeling in a lot of ways, in these small moments when you get surprised by life and people around you.
In contrast to that dopamine culture, you can try to grow and you can learn a lot about life by trying to do that. Before you’ve done it, you wouldn’t expect how much you can actually learn, how deeply you feel, how embodied that feeling is, how it’s real knowledge. When we grow up in a mechanized culture where we’re not connected to it.
KK: Going back to your lyrics, what I’ve always appreciated about it was how abstract it is, but not too abstract to completely lose its meaning. A lot of singer-songwriter material is centered around love, relationships, heartbreaks, but in a more literal way. And I always appreciated the poetry and the symbolism in the lyrical content. The audience can make it their own, to give it their own meaning. And you’ve preserved that DNA, which I find very admirable. Opening the door to imagination. You are influenced by Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, very personal introspective music. Of course, brit pop and this whole era. What’s the music that you’re still revisiting from that catalog today?
JW: One byproduct of online culture is the mechanism for discovering and listening to music changed. The music that you get touched by when you’re a teenager is very important. The height of the CD era, falling in love with the album form. Being able to buy CDs regularly but not too many or swapping them with someone else, that was how I spent my money. Also reading magazines, it was a different critical culture.
KK: Do you remember the first CD you bought with your own money?
JW: Yes, I do. It was Michael Jackson Dangerous for xmas and then I bought Bad with some Christmas money.
KK: Solid choice.
JW: Yeah, when you were a kid back in the 80s, Michael Jackson was basically music. I’ve always been drawn to songwriting, the album form, and musicianship. Music is endless, I love soul music of the 70s. Stevie Wonder to me is the greatest of all time.
KK: What’s your favorite Stevie song? Please don’t hate me for that question, I know it's a tough one.
JW: It’s funny that once you answer that question, you can immediately think “oh, I need a different one now.” they won’t go when I go on the Fullfillingness’ First Finale album.
KK: When I went to the Take6 gig just a few months ago, they did a rendition to Overjoy, which is my favorite Stevie song. It was out of this planet. So beautiful with the vocal layering in an acapella setting.
JW: I think if you wanna learn anything about contemporary music, it’s all there, in Stevie Wonder’s catalog. The jazz, soul, gospel, electronic, technical exploration, the generosity of spirit, activism, it’s all there. Incredible harmony, making complex jazz harmony work in a pop song form, it’s genius upon genius upon genius. To me, Innervisions is the perfect album. Front to back, the pacing and everything. That album is always there at the back of my mind, and how can I make my own music flow as good as Innervisions. Maybe I’ll get there one day. Recently, I’ve been listening to Fullfillingness’ First Finale album a lot more because it was one of those albums I didn’t know that well, so I’ve been hammering that one. That’s my obsessive answer, and of course there’s a ton of inspiring music out there, but I tend not to listen to a lot of music when I’m writing, but also there’s more competition now with all other things that you might listen to or watch, like scrolling and podcasts.