In between the meet & greet and a packed headlining show at the main hall of the Ancienne Belgique in Brussels, Belgium, Jesse Barnett, vocalist of Stick To Your Guns and Ways Away, took the time to sit down with us for 45 minutes of wearing his heart on his sleeve.
Thank you so much for your time, during what is undoubtedly a very busy and hectic period. You are in the middle of a 4 week tour, there is a lot going on back in Los Angeles and you released an amazing new record called Keep Planting Flowers. How do you cope with all this? And have you been able to follow up on the response?
It’s been incredible and overwhelming. The wildfire [in Los Angeles] was just so out of nowhere and last minute and it caused a lot of panic. I was like, how am I going to leave on tour? I take care of my mom, my fiancé is here and I got my animals and my bookstore. Luckily Josh [James] really talked me off the ledge and offered to fly my fiancé out. That really helped put me at ease. Although obviously, there is still the anxieties of things changing at any moment, which sucks. But hopefully we’re going to see the end of it soon.
Because of that I haven’t really been focusing on the response so much. But Andrew [Rose], our bass player, likes to look at those things. So when there are really good reviews, he will screenshot it and send it to our group chat or whatever. And it is nice to hear people say such nice things. It even got to the point where he was sending so many to the chat where I was like, fuck, maybe I have to go look for myself. I think people were really resonating with what we were feeling. And although I hate to use the word validation, everyone wants their feelings validated and to feel like what they’re experiencing is real. So it is super nice.
Talking about the new album, how did you come up with the title and the artwork and what does it mean to you?
Stick To Your Guns has been doing the band for 20 plus years and I’m so grateful for that. Artistically though, you can fall into making the obvious choices, making the choice that “Stick To Your Guns” would make. And originally we were going to call the album ‘More Than A Witness’, because we felt like it is so hardcore sounding and blah, blah, blah. It was the obvious choice. But Josh suggested using the ‘keep planting flowers’ lyric from ‘Keep Planting Flowers’ as the title. At first I was like you are fucking crazy bro, because I just felt too concerned with what other people were going to think about it. I wanted the album to do well and so I was like, just make the safe, obvious choice and we’ll be good. I was acting out of fear. But with the artwork, we did not make a safe, obvious choice, ha ha. And in the end with the album title, we didn’t make the safe, obvious choice and it has really paid off for us.
But it is hard to make decisions for yourself, especially when your band has become, I don’t want to make it ugly and say your job, but it becomes the way that we afford to live and shit like that. There is a lot that rides on those choices that we make that you don’t think matter. And everyone wants something from you. And as we get older it’s a different set of challenges. I got to look after my mom and Chris has a kid. On the surface it looks like just deciding between ‘Keep Planting Flowers’ and ‘More Than A Witness’, but these are all things that you are weighing. Evenmore because we are not only playing the business side. We believe that we have a certain responsibility, especially as a band that calls themselves a hardcore band, to make hard decisions.
It’s something a lot of people might not know and see.
Absolutely. And I think that bands need to start working together. We believe as bands, because we own our business, that we are in charge, but we are all employees. Our bosses are Live Nation, AEG, Spotify and Apple Music. These are the people that we work for, because these are the people who pay the money. We’re fed into such a competitive nature, and it’s not working anymore. Bands need to tour that much nowadays to be able to make money, because we don’t make any money from our music. So we are almost always in a constant state of panic. Like any working class person, especially right now with inflation and the political disasters everywhere. And what happens when you’re in a state of panic? You close your door, you shut off and you just worry about yourself and protecting you and yours, and that’s it. But if we could see past this mentality for a second, we could overnight demand more money from Spotify. This is why they need to keep us competing with each other. I believe we need to be more collaborative rather than competitive, because if we work together, we will all immediately see that our material lives will become better. I think people are starting to kind of see that.
Thank you for sharing this with us. I was wondering if you could give some background on ‘Keep Planting Flowers’, the song. Because in contrast to the artwork and the general theme of the album, it sounds less activist and seems to be touching on a more emotional topic.
The song was inspired by two things. One was the fact that I had so many close friends that had friends who were killing themselves. I’ve experienced this before in my life, but not at the rate in which I was seeing it everywhere happening to people who were close to me. And so I felt like I needed to write something that could help comfort them.
And then the second is like a reminder. I kind of have daddy issues and I have a hard time saying what I need to say to my father. And it’s almost like when I listen to the song, it’s like, don’t wait until you can. And especially the older I get, [I realize] I’m just like him. God damn. But I love him, I do. But maybe we can make a little bit different decisions than they did. And again, who knows how they progressed from their fathers. Because I know he’s a poor Mexican from Texas. His dad beat the fuck out of him. Luckily, I didn’t necessarily have any shit like that. And even though it might have looked like a train wreck to me, he improved. And so it’s the grace and understanding, all of that kind of stuff.
Stick To Your Guns has been going hard for over 20 years. Are there things you still hope to achieve with Stick To Your Guns or outside of it?
I’ll try to keep this as short as I can, but it’s gonna be a long answer. For any person who tours like we tour it is easy to become “the guy” from the band. I was Jesse from Stick To Your Guns. This was my identity. Then COVID happened. No more touring. No more writing songs. No more putting out albums. I was no longer Jesse from Stick To Your Guns. And I had an identity crisis. I got so wrapped up in what I was doing with Stick To Your Guns that I couldn’t even fathom that there was gonna be a part of my life where this wasn’t a thing anymore. I’ve been doing it longer than I have not been doing it and so I was like, fuck, I got to become a real person. This ultimately led to All Power [Books] opening.
To me, if you’re going to be an artist, and this is like my number one principle of being an artist, you need to have a life outside of being the guy from the band because this is what you draw from. If you don’t have that you start being like, what do I think the people who like our band want to hear? So once I found myself through All Power and through this, what some people will view may be an extreme political rebirth, it has given me so much purpose and my well of creativity has just been overflowing. Almost to the point now where I just wish it would stop. I just put the Stick To Your Guns album out, I’m releasing a Ways Away album, I have an acoustic album in the chamber and I have more Stick to Your Guns songs I want to write. It’s gotten to the point now where on tour is my break because I’m just chilling now and when I get home, life is so crazy. But it feels so good because I found this amazing community who fucking love me for exactly who I am. Even though I can be kind of an intense person and I can sometimes repel people because I’m kind of a big liver. It’s unconditional and there’s a whole wealth of life that happens outside of Stick to Your Guns. And I feel like I need to have a life, a real life, something true and deep to draw from. Otherwise I’m just faking it. And I feel like a lot of artists fall into that trap.
With all that is going on in the US and in Los Angeles, I assume it is a busy time for All Power?
All Power is a weird situation, because we are so devoutly communist, and we wear it on our sleeve, and most of the time this, especially in the US, pushes people away. But then something happens, like this fire, and we are on the news and in the L.A. Times and get covered pretty often, because there’s a community need that no one is meeting, except for who? All Power. And so they walk this weird line with us, where they want to highlight the work we are doing, but they don’t want to highlight the politics behind it, which is fine. I’m not trying to make everybody communist. That’s not my goal. I’m just trying to explain the world as it works and translate it to the average working person, so that they can understand how they’re being used. What I’ve learned from working in all these kinds of different organizing spaces, is that you can’t talk on behalf of anyone.
And it’s been amazing to see how people have been able to come together through what I would call the ideals of socialism, but you don’t even have to call it that. Call it whatever you want. But people are starting to go, “oh, I kind of fuck with this”. And I think people in America, especially, are really starting to wake up to that. Gas is $10 a gallon and people can’t afford bread for their kids. The average working American person is suffering in pretty bad ways right now. I’m seeing firsthand the suffering that comes through All Power’s doors and sometimes it’s too much to bear.
And you have to fight like hell just for a fucking centimeter of progress. And I understand why that’s not an appealing life path for certain people, but… Sorry, I get so emotional about it. I get on stage and I say things and there’s just some people, they don’t have the capability to even compute or understand what it is that I’m saying. Because they live in such a different plane of existence, that I just sound like a crazy person to them. But a lot of that craziness is starting to become validated now. And so the personal lesson that I learned from all that is trying to remain calm and level-headed and just like not become overly emotional, even though it’s so easy to. I know that I stand on the right side of the thing now, even if I’m doing it alone. Because I know I won’t be for long. That gives me hope.
Talking about All Power Books, do you have any reading suggestions for our readers?
I find myself working with working class people who either work in factories or they work for Amazon, Starbucks or whatever the fuck. And I was like, what is my job? I’m a musician. Okay, I need to start trying to organize musicians. And it’s like the hardest thing in the world, but I got a cool little group right now and we’re growing every day. I read this book called ‘Composing Capital’ (Marianna Ritchey) and it talks about the effect that capitalism has had on the classical music scene. And at first when this book was suggested to me, I was like classical music? But it really opened my eyes to the true nature of the music industry and how it actually works. It’s not about championing the most creative ideas or the hardest workers or anything like that. There are so many talented people who will never, if we’re being honest, go down a creative path in their life because they simply don’t have the time. The only people who have the time to really follow their dreams are the people who either take risks that are probably too big for them to be taking or people who are affluent and have money to take these risks because either their mother and father are paying their rent or whatever it is.
And I’m not shitting on anyone who has a situation like that. I wish I had that situation. But where will this lead the music industry if the only people who are allowed to play are people who come from backgrounds that are rich or well off? What kind of opinions are we going to hear? How will we get any new ideas? I hear different sounds of music, different genres and different styles all saying the exact same shit. Ultimately, nothing. In a weird way, I feel like I’ve become a little bit more disconnected. And there are a lot of bands like trying to come up and do those things and say those things, but it’s hard for them to kind of rise up because they have the whole political factor working against them. But I wish there were people who risked a little bit more because they would realize the more of us that there are, we don’t have to be so scared. So how do we level the playing field a little bit?
Final question. When people head home, after tonight’s show, what is the one thing you would like for them to take home?
That you can’t make any real long lasting peaceful decisions in your life if you’re making them out of fear or despair. That’s not living. That’s survival. Tupac used to say “I’m not going to change the world, but I might spark the mind that does”. That is ultimately what I want. To spark something in someone. It might not light and catch ablaze tomorrow. But if I can add to someone’s potential, that’s what I want. To be the first little ember.
Thank you so much, Jesse.
