In Conversation With Jay Buchanan

Solo artist, songwriter, musician and frontman of American rock band Rival Sons, Jay Buchanan is not only multi-talented but also a very busy man. However, he sat down with JLTT for an in-depth ‘In Conversation’ piece:

Early Life

When & where were you born?

Born in San Bernardino, CA July 6, 1975.

Where did you grow up?

Early childhood (primary school) was spent between Fontana, CA and West Cajon Valley(High Desert) then in the mountains of Wrightwood, CA (middle/high school) formative years were spent in the woods there and the high desert nearby. Serrano high school, finished 1993.

When did you first start singing?

It’s hard to recall a time that I wasn’t. I thought everyone sang when I was really young. I thought it was as common as speaking and that when people sang they were their truest, most vulnerable and real selves and I really thought that was how it all worked. Still do. My pops would have my sister and I run scales and we’d of course sing along with everyone in church. I was chosen for honors choir at 9 yrs then sacked later that year for disciplinary reasons. Again chosen for chamber madrigals at 11 and it was great singing in German, Italian with complex, dynamic compositions. Moving to Wrightwood later that year there was no elite choir so I didn’t actively sing again until I started to get serious about songwriting late in my 13th year. Then came bands. Early 16th year with low grades I needed an easy A so I reluctantly joined the high school show choir. Yes, fucking show choir with its dancing, sequins and (mostly) terrible, saccharine arrangements. Strangely, it turned out to be the best thing for me at the time as it gave me something to prove and participate in at school. Marks went up immediately in my other classes and the choir’s teacher Scott Walker put me front and center every chance he got. After high school it was all singer/songwriter albums/touring until RIVAL SONS.

What is your earliest musical memory?

My mother singing to me. Tiny child in my mother’s arms here voice was all comfort and sweet things in the world. It might as well have been the sound equivalent of Narnia to me because it gave me a real experience of traveling somewhere beautiful without moving at all. To this day that’s exactly what I chase.

 

What school did you attend and where did you graduate from?

I’ve only completed High School. I went to junior colleges off and on, took a ton of classes but with my focus on gigging and songwriting.

 

What did you study?

Mostly philosophy and literature. I really had no intention of graduating so I mainly attended lectures and read the texts but would often skip exams altogether so I missed a lot.

 

When did you first start playing guitar?

Steel stringed acoustic guitar is impossible for young hands. The living room guitar was a high-actioned terrible beast to me. My little hands could do nothing. With my whole hand I could barely fret three note bass lines at 9 years while my Pop played and I continued to play single notes until 11 then at 12 he showed me the box pattern chord structure so I could start writing songs.

 

What introduced you to the instrument?

My Pop. I was influenced watching him play. I’d just lay there when he’d come home from the mill and had a shower. He’d just play. I always thought, listening; that he was saying all the things he couldn’t at the mill. It always had that caged bird sound. To this day when I create, it’s his cage that I often write from.

 

What do your parents do? What is your heritage?

Both parents have a high school education and were married during their senior year. Pops got a job at the local steel mill to provide and my Mom would clean houses before later working at a distribution warehouse. Heritage? It’s all over the place but the strongest lineage goes to the UK area.

 

Did you have any official guitar lessons / music school etc?

-other than a little choir in high school I’m self taught.

 

Do you play other instruments?

Learning my way around any instrument has always been through the function of writing. I’m an artist much more than a musician so whatever I pick up I figure out some sort of vocabulary on it. It could be a wood block or a violin or a tuba, I’ll try to find a story to tell. I’ve invested so much time in the guitar but I don’t really see myself as a guitar player and to be honest the instrument is still a damned mystery to me. Bass and upright bass are some of my main songwriting tools but I also write a lot on lap dulcimer, vibraphone, mandolin, tenor guitar, harmonica and of course piano. I’m a real shit piano player but it’s great for writing, full chords right at your fingertips and all.

 

Professional History

What was your first professional work as a musician?

I played coffee shops and busked as a teenager. I remember the first time I earned $100 in tips I went home and ironed every bill and stacked them up and just stared at it. Weird, right? I remember thinking “This came from my imagination, I can write my future.” At 16 I met music producer/arranger Mark Brymer he kindly took me under his wing for a minute to introduce me to what the business of music was made of and telling me what books to read, how to copyright etc. I’d never been to Los Angeles before but I went and recorded my original songs with Mark at an actual studio with real equipment and it absolutely blew my mind. The opportunity fizzled out as I now understand is the industry standard but I was able to combine those recordings along with my own and sell cassette tapes at school and get more gigs. That experience left a deep impression on me.

 

Please list your band history prior to Rival Sons

I bounced around bands in early high school, mostly punk playing locally. After a short couple of years doing that I knew punk wasn’t my sound at all so I started playing solo acoustic, putting bands together based on that sound. With two years of high school still left, a Los Angeles record producer spotted me and invited me down to record my songs and made a lot of big plans. That fizzled out; no surprise, but it gave me a taste for what I did and didn’t want moving forward. I took those recordings and sold tapes at school. I used those earnings to purchase my own track recorder and began multitracking my own demos. Continuing to play coffee shops and busking I played around the Inland Empire writing songs. In those late teen years I worked full time, attended school while living with a girlfriend and saw myself slowly writing and gigging less and less. The trappings of adulthood were choking me out. Disillusioned and disappointed I sold my belongings at 20, bought backpacking gear and split for Alaska for a summer and from Anchorage hitchhiked my way south to the Kenai peninsula to work. I came home lean and focused, moved to Orange County and began writing for what would eventually be the VIOLENCE album. I put together a band of friends to play some of this material and named the band BITTERNESS after a Stephen Crane poem. Played a couple shows in LA and then I split the band up. In 1997 at the age of 22 I got married and became a father in 1998.


I got a day job at a mortuary and began the long process of self recording and producing VIOLENCE and started building a new audience from scratch by hitting open mic nights at various cafes. I didn’t know anyone locally and wanted to build something entirely new from nothing. I think it’s something about the need to switch audiences when you’re searching for a new artistic identity. After hitting enough of these opening mic spots an audience developed pretty quickly. After meeting Ty Stewart I had the idea of guerrilla gigging: Go to wherever a large group of people are, set up an amp and mic stand, run an extension cord to the nearest outlet and play until we were kicked out or the cops showed up. It worked. We’d hit five or more places a night every night. Within two months I had a large enough audience to fill a small club and got local residencies with the band. I started getting local write-ups in OC Weekly which was a big deal in the area. Five months later we had management, an attorney were being courted by four major labels. It was a head-spinning time. We went with independent label Ultimatum, toured nationally all of 2002-2005 while releasing ALL UNDERSTOOD in 2003. TRUE LOVE EP came in February 2006. I was starting to burn out on my approach to music.


In the summer of 2006 I did an unlikely thing by playing solo supporting teen sensation Ryan Cabrera on a US tour. Thousands of screaming young girls. The tour was very depressing but nonetheless a very important experience. After that five week tour I came home for two days then left for another one month tour in Australia opening for pop duo The Veronicas. More screaming teens. Oddly, touring with both of these pop acts turned out to be just what I needed. I came home late August and began a vegan diet, got a job working construction and dove back into rehearsals with BUCHANAN for some upcoming shows in Los Angeles. We played around town but something had changed for me, I felt a familiar unrest. Unknown by myself and the rest of the band at that time, BUCHANAN played for the last time on stage together on October 28, 2006. 

Within a couple of months I began writing from a different place, through a different voice. It’s not as if I actively withheld honesty in the music before, but we hide things from ourselves unwittingly. I made the conscious decision to destroy the huge fan database BUCHANAN had amassed the previous seven years and start over completely while relearning to write with a new voice. It slowly took shape. In the late summer of 2007 I began recording Locust & Wild Honey with producer/engineer Chris Karn. The recording process and the collection itself marked a complete reinvention in my approach to music and self expression. In the last two months of these sessions I met up with Scott Holiday and Rival Sons was born. Locust & Wild Honey remains unreleased.

Is that when you started recording with Buchanan?

I began recording with the initial lineup in late 1998 for sessions that became the VIOLENCE album featuring Chris Powell on drums, Todd Sanders on bass and Leroy Powell on lead guitar. That record was self produced with a little help from Thomas Rabone acting as recording engineer for the drum recordings. In 1999 Leroy split and Ty Stewart came on as lead guitarist and thus was the line up for Buchanan until 2001 when Michael Miley took over on drums during Chris Powell’s 8 month hiatus. Brett Bixby joined on keys/guitar in 2005.

What albums did you release with Buchanan / any other bands before Rival Sons? (List your full back catalogue if possible)

 

Buchanan – VIOLENCE 1999

 

Buchanan – ALL UNDERSTOOD 2004

 

Buchanan – TRUE LOVE EP 2006

 

Jay Buchanan – LIVE IN THE STUDIO 2006

 

Jay Buchanan – LOCUST & WILD HONEY 2008

 

How would you describe the sound of these bands?

BUCHANAN’s sound fell somewhere between singer/songwriter/rock.

 

Who was in Buchanan with you?

Ty Stewart- Guitars
Todd Sanders- Bass

Chris Powell- Drums/Percussion

Brett Bixby- Keys/guitars

 

Rival Sons

 

Who is in Rival Sons and what do they play?

Jay Buchanan – Singer, Acoustic Guitar.

Scott Holiday – Guitar

Dave Beste – Bass

Michael Miley – Drums

 

How did you come to be part of Rival Sons?

I had known Miley since 2000 and he’d played drums in BUCHANAN for nearly a year in 02. We’d kept in touch, he reached out blah, blah blah.

 

Rival Sons’ latest album ‘Lightbringer’ is out now. How did you want to approach the making of this album?

For myself, I knew it was a crucial time to reinvent myself as well as my approach to writing music again. Scott (Holiday) and I had many conversations on the topic throughout the writing of the material. Having been in the Rock genre for the previous seven records I was personally looking to push its boundaries in any natural sense we were capable of. 


 

Rival Sons also released the album ‘Darkfighter’ which has elements of British bands such as The Kinks and Status Quo amongst others. Was that British rock sound a conscious decision or not so much?

You can definitely hear those influences on our first few records but as far as FERAL ROOTS, DARKFIGHTER or LIGHTBRINGER I can only think of one song with a remote British rock sound, “Sweet Life”. Other than that I’m at a loss to draw a comparison. In the beginning, the golden age of rock was a common ground for the band to meet on with our varied influences.

 

What is the story/inspiration behind the track ‘Bird In The Hand’?

I’d put it in the typical “burn your past and devour your present” category.

Could you tell us about the trio of videos for DARKFIGHTER including ‘Bird In The Hand’?

It began with Scott and I developing a storyline and look for NOBODY WANTS TO DIE then collaborated with director Éli Sokhn who went to great lengths to bring it all to life. After all of the videos we’ve made it was nice to have some lighthearted, character-driven videos. Once we did the first one, I wrote the treatment for RAPTURE and brought in director and longtime friend Kurt Kubicek who knocked it straight out of the park. The video stars Scott’s kid Devendra riding his tiny Coleman motorbike through the desert to deliver a message to the video trilogy’s antagonist THE PREACHER warning him that the gang knows where he is. I love the way that one turned out. The story arc of the three videos goes in reverse chronologically. BIRD IN THE HAND shows the gang all together celebrating a successful heist just before things go south. This one was again directed by Kubicek.

How would you describe your vocal technique & style?

My vocal style? On loud songs I’d call it something like “beat it into submission”. Dig as deep as you can and goddamn whatever comes out. On softer material, which is my absolute preference; it’s a slow, romantic dance somewhere between a raging desire and a frail physicality. Vulnerability defeats all.

Do you have any favoured stage equipment or microphones that you particularly like to use?

Jay uses:

Mics: Shure

Guitars: Guild, Gibson, Taylor, Martin, Yamaha, Cordoba, Recording King,

Amps: LR Baggs, Supro, Orange

Anything else: DR Strings

Feature Image Photo Credit: Patrik Skoglow

Rival Sons most recent albums ‘Lightbringer’ and ‘Darkfighter’ are both out now on Low Country Sound/Atlantic Records. 

Rival Sons will embark on tour dates in 2024 including Thursday 11th July 2024 as special guests alongside Those Damn Crows for ZZ Top’s only UK show of 2024 at OVO Arena Wembley, Wembley, London, United Kingdom.

For tickets and more information on Rival Sons visit their official website here: https://www.rivalsons.com/