ON THE RISE
For Grammy nominated rocker Ja’son Manwill, the competition to be America’s Next Top Hitmaker is the latest step in a career as a performer, songwriter and producer.
Between steps were some challenges that could have caused him to surrender to the emotion in the title of his Grammy nominated single “Despair.”
Instead, he is now a quarterfinalist in the Hitmaker competition, which puts him among the top 1 percent of contestants.
He wants fans to know this about him: “I have been through so much in such a short period of time that I appreciate life to the fullest, and I want to make sure every time a fan comes to my show, they get the best show they’ve ever seen. I leave everything on the stage.”
His specialty is rock, his own and his take on rock classics. He has a voice built for the job and the guitar work to go with it.
His first instrument was the piano, and from there he progressed to the point where he now plays that and guitar, drums, bass, cello and 24 other orchestral instruments.
“When I was growing up, I played piano, then from piano I learned bass, and then from bass I learned guitar.”
His career to date has had more twists and turns than a dirt road in the Rockies. In the beginning, he played in Chicago area cover bands. In 1995, he wrote “Despair,” the song that eventually got him a Grammy nomination. That’s a story, too.
He was in a relationship, a serious one involving a ring, but one day she gave him the ring back. Sort of.
“Basically, I got the ring back not from her but her mother, and the day I found out was the same night that I watched The Wedding Singer and Adam Sandler’s song about Linda. Immediately after I watched that movie, I went to my bedroom and started writing ‘Despair.’”
At the time, he said, he was listening to Green Day and Blink 182, so the music is “an homage to them.” The vocals were inspired by the Sex Pistols.
“At first it was really, really dark, and it evolved from there.”
About that same time, someone close to him told him that he had no talent and no voice and he took it to heart.
“Basically, for 12 years I stopped doing what I loved because someone close to me told me that I wasn’t good enough.”
During those years, he made a living traveling and speaking and doing training seminars.
“I was a speaker and trainer traveling all over the world, to three continents, and I was on some of the top stages of the planet.”
But after his day job came music.
“At night, I would go to the hotel lobby and I’d say, ‘Hey, where’s a karaoke bar? Where’s an open mic bar?’ And I would go there and perform.”
Gradually he regained his passion and drive for music.
“Every time I went somewhere, that’s what I was doing.”
One night in Wisconsin, he was playing Led Zeppelin’s “All My Love,” and someone came up to him and said, “Hey, would you like to be in our band?”
“Like, it was just that simple.”
That was 2007. Two years into that renaissance and he was back, about to make it big. He had an interview scheduled on MTV and then, in a freak accident, he suffered a traumatic brain injury when he raised up while getting cilantro out of the refrigerator and hit his head on the freezer.
The blow struck a soft spot on the back of his head. “I was 2 pounds, 14 ounces when I was born, and that soft spot on the back of your head, which normally grows and fills in, did not do that for me.”
Three days later he was in an ICU, experiencing a hundred seizures an hour. That was his life for years.
In the 2014-15, period, he said, “I decided that I was going to be the cause versus the effect of my environment and, no matter what, I was going to get back on the stage again because that’s what I love doing.”
He describes that time as “tough.” He hadn’t played any instrument for years, but he persevered and, eventually, “I left everything and went to Paris, France. I played with people from ‘The Voice,’ and I was playing every day in the squares with them. I got my passion back to play again.”
Back in the states, he continued performing at karaoke and open mic bars, wrote the music for Ashley Garland’s award-winning song “Mother,” from the film Nawal the Jewel, finally produced “Despair” and was nominated for a Grammy.
Since 2022, he said, “I’ve been taking my music to a whole ’nother level,” performing at karaokes and open mics.
In addition to his appearance on “Hitmaker,” he is getting ready to put out some music.
A pair of songs is coming out in October: “It Bites Like a Serpent,” “which is like a Doors-slash-Ozzy Osbourne type of song,” and “Fright and the Fear,” “a Metallica inspired riff with melodic things that you’ve never heard.”
Before then he has a three-track EP he will release as soon as he gets it back from production. “Finding Love Again” is an AC/DC-Guns and Rose type of thing.” “Prisoner” is like Guns and Roses with Days Of The New and a “’90s type of feel.”
“And ‘Rise Above It All’ is the true story of a person that was addicted to drugs for 40 years, got off them, started helping other people get off them, and he wanted me to tell his story.” It has some Led Zeppelin vibes and it also has “this Elton John, Billy Joel type of flair.”
Every song he does, he said, is different.
Connect to Ja’son Manwill on all platforms for new music, videos, and social posts, and cast a FREE vote for Ja’son to be featured in Rolling Stone Magazine this September at https://tophitmaker.org/2024/ja-39-son-manwill.
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ON THE RISE
Gang of Youths frontman David Le’aupepe has spoken to NME about the band’s first new single in four years ‘Things Take Time’ and the “philosophical freedom” that has come with writing new material for the band’s long-awaited fourth studio album.
The single marks the band’s first new original material since their acclaimed 2022 album ‘Angel In Realtime.’, and marks a significant change of pace. Rather than returning to the maximalist, big-swinging indie-rock that has shaped their previous albums, ‘Things Take Time’ opts for a refined and jazzy groove that swings atop sparse piano chords and stabs of horns.
As far as comeback singles go, it’s about as subtle and discreet as possible – as if it’s entering through a side door rather than kicking the front gate open. As Le’aupepe revealed, this has very much been done by design.
‘Angel In Realtime.’ was given four stars by NME upon its 2022 release, and described as “a triumphant exploration of love and life”. It led to the biggest shows of the band’s career, including their first-ever headlining arena shows in their native Australia and selling out Brixton Academy in the UK. After a final show in support of the record at British Summer Time with Lana Del Rey, however, Gang of Youths effectively went dark – save for the late 2023 release of ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ for the festive season.
“We all live quiet lives,” Le’aupepe told NME. “We don’t have our own social media, or anything like that. We’re not interested in the public stuff, and I tend to require a lot of respite from the world. Having said that, we’re all kind of ready for it again now. It’s weirdly exciting.”
Check out the full interview with Le’aupepe below, where he discussed the differences between observational and emotive songwriting, the ongoing struggle with perfectionism and why Gang of Youths continually has to die in order to be reborn again.
NME: Hello Dave. Of all the new material the band has been working on, why was ‘Things Take Time’ chosen as the first single?
David Le’aupepe: “Well, the powers that be chose it – probably because it’s the shortest one! It’s a three-minute song, which is miraculous for a band like ours. It’s also a pop song, which is a form I’ve not really dabbled in much. It was a really liberating song to write – I’ve used that word so many times in interviews in the past, but in this instance it really set me free in a sense. I’m actually singing for once, too. I’ve done a lot of talking that happens to be in tune, or these grandiose fucking yells, but I haven’t really allowed my voice to be free like this before.
“One of the things I really like about the song is that, when it was finished and we listened back to it, it felt like a proper break with the past – and we were OK with that. We’ve achieved great things in the past, and we’re proud of it, but this is the thread we’re following now musically. I was delighted by that.”
What place did the song come from in a lyrical sense?
“It’s about nothing… Well, not nothing. It’s about growing plants. My wife ordered too many tomato seeds, so she went to work growing all of these tomatoes in our house. I go over to record with Tom [Hobden, Gang of Youths’ multi-instrumentalist] at his home studio, and that overlooks his back garden. His wife Emma grows all these beautiful plants in the yard. It got me fascinated with the cycle of growth and death, and being baffled that people can grow things without killing them.
“It’s funny… I feel like death and rebirth are a constant part of our subject matter. We’re always dealing with them in one way or another, so it’s kind of weird that we almost accidentally continued it – even though the song is so different for us.”
How naturally did the musical change of pace come to you? There’s fittingly a bit of a parallel with a song like ‘Tend the Garden’, but even that feels a lot bigger and more layered in comparison to ‘Things Take Time’…
“I came in with the idea one night after dinner, and played the little riff. Recorded it, played a drum part, recorded that, got Donnie [Borzestowski, Gang of Youths’ drummer] to redo it, and voilà. You hear all of us at work on this song. When Tom heard my little ‘doo doo doo’ in the verse, it was his idea to chuck in a horn arrangement to replicate them. Donnie is a world-class drummer, and doing something a bit jazzier was right in his repertoire.
“As for Jung [Kim, Gang of Youths’ guitarist/keyboardist], he always has such a deft hand. He’s always so careful, and so organised with his thoughts. I think that’s why it was funny when I finally sent in my vocal take – after doing like 400 takes, he was just like, ‘Fuck it, I don’t really need to worry about it’. Nothing came easily, but everything just made sense.”
Everything went into radio silence after ‘Angel in Realtime.’ Was there ever a period between that cycle ending and the new one beginning where you genuinely thought Gang of Youths was over?
“Of course. That happens after every album we’ve made. I sit there at the end saying ‘I’m done’, and then enough time passes and I’m up like Leo [DiCaprio] in The Wolf of Wall Street: ‘I’m not fucking leaving!’ Out of all of the cycles, ‘Angel’ was definitely the hardest. I love that album, I really do; I think it’s my best songwriting, but it was this whole family odyssey. The arena thing was so weird, too. We’re an indie rock band – we never set out to play in stadiums, especially when you look at how scrappy we were when the band started. It was just the nature of things.
“If we came back trying to be an arena-rock band? Snoozy as fuck. We’re not in that place anymore. Those songs from ‘Angel’ are everyone else’s now. They don’t really play a role in my day-to-day life, or my inner world. What ‘Things Take Time’ represents is a philosophical freedom from having to write about personal shit. I had to break this cycle of feeling like I have to make opuses that dig into the underbelly of my life every single time. I could just write songs with their own meaning, that are curious and spiritual without having to directly cost me something.”
Was it a process of realising a song could still be reflective of you without having to be very hyper-literally about you, the way a song like ‘Brothers’ was?
“The writing now is less and less about trying to find things within myself to deal with, and more and more about things that I notice and that I contemplate. The new songs are, more often than not, about something I’ve observed rather than something I’ve felt. They’re about the external. There’s another new song we played, ‘YeYu’, and that’s probably the only really personal song out of all of them. That’s a real point of difference for a songwriter like me.”
As you just mentioned, you played your first show in three years earlier this month at a small theatre 90 minutes south of Sydney, with three new songs on the setlist – including ‘Things Take Time’. What did performing on stage again mean to you?
“Loads. It renewed something in me. There was a real warmth and affection there – you always get that with regional audiences in beautiful theatres. I knew some people who were in the front row, and who said hi afterwards. People have gotten married since they last saw us, or had kids since they last saw us. It was nice to see a lot of those familiar faces, and to see how they’re existing and how life is for them now. Hell, it was just nice to see people again. Sometimes, the boredom and the monotony of playing live and touring can wear down on even the most dedicated road dog. We all felt that at the end of the last tour, so there were some nerves in coming back to it. As soon as we stepped out on stage, though, it was like, ‘this is what it’s all about. This is the point of it all’.”
That show felt like a lot of the older material was being reinvented through the lens of the new stuff. You played ‘Magnolia’ solo on electric guitar, and ‘Let Me Down Easy’ was pared back in a really subtle way. Can we expect Gang of Youths’ shows to play out a little differently now that it’s no longer a confetti-cannon arena rock show?
“We haven’t even figured that out yet. This was our first foray into really doing it again, you know? The album that we’re working on has more of a sense of just plugging in and playing – a lot of bare elements of piano, bass, drums, vocals. We want these songs to stand out by themselves, as opposed to needing loads of backing tracks running in order for them to work. That factored into the live show – could we reinvent these songs in a way that makes sense to us? It was about striking a middle ground between giving people familiarity and us not dying of boredom.”
Is the new album done?
“Nah.”
How will you know when it’s done?
“When someone tells me it’s not the worst thing I’ve ever made! With [debut album, 2015’s] ‘The Positions’, I had no clue what I was doing. I just knew we had a deadline to turn everything in. With [second album, 2017’s] ‘Go Farther in Lightness’, I was totally sure about every aspect of that album before we turned it in. All I really know about this one, so far, is that when I got back the masters for ‘Things Take Time’, it felt like I was closer to the end of the album than I was to the beginning. I’ve always cooked the goose too long, I think, and now it’s a process of learning not to.”
‘Things Take Time’ is out now. Gang of Youths will perform at All Points East in London’s Hyde Park with Twenty One Pilots on August 30 before a run of UK and European shows in November and December. Visit here for tickets and more information.
