On Pledge Music, And Looking Forward
S.T: Final question! With new album Secrets That Nobody Keeps, youve used the Pledge website to generate enough money to create it through fan-funding. How did you decide on doing it this way, and do you think this is a good way of creating an album without getting involved with record labels?
J.G: Well for me it made a lot of sense because my audience is about 50% online, so it made sense to have a campaign for the album online, and it was a lot of fun to do it. It was also a
lot of work, and I couldnt do it every time because fulfilling the pledges that people made, like people ordered stuff and then we made it, packing them up and sending them off has been really, really time-consuming, and a lot of fun! Basically I dont have a record label, its me, my manager, and we have someone else who runs our online sales, so between the three of us, we were standing in a post office for about two and a half hours with just massive sacks of jiffy-bag stuff and CDs! Our local Post Office are amazing, they really looked after us! (laughs), but thats not, I mean I dont know maybe he does, but I dont imagine someone like Newton Faulkner stands around in a Post Office with a sack full of 600 CDs! Hes not missing anything, believe me! (laughs) So theres a lot of extra work in being an independent artist, and its good stuff but it is a lot of work. I think I will do it again, but probably not with the next album.
S.T: Personally I think thats amazing, because that process is so freeing, and it's completely artistic. In the end you havent had to curtail anything you were going to do, or sacrifice anything.
J.G: That is true in the end yeah, that is completely true, so for better or for worse everything is down for me, Ill have final say. Even with the producer, Ive employed that guy but he doesnt have creative control over the album, I do. In saying that, he is amazingly talented, but the buck stops here. Even the artwork, the little paintings that accompany the album are mine. The whole thing with being an artist is that youre expressing yourself, and I think the way you present the music to people whether at a gig or on album, Im totally into this approach. The last thing I would do, is try and create another Passionflower-type song, thats just not what Im about. One of the great challenges and joys about being a solo artist is trying to be as varied as you can, so I try and write something completely different to what Ive done before. If someone who checked out Passionflower and didnt like the rest of my old stuff, I can completely understand that, but I dont care yno? I dont give a f*ck! (laughs) So are you guys going to grab a copy of the album? Were you just as floored by Jon's phenomenal talent as the rest of us when watching his clips? What have you made of his wider work outside of Passionflower? Let us know in the comments!