California love

Jeremy Jay talks Swiss French immersion,
Movies on Tape and how YouTube
killed the video star

WALKING ON AIR: Jeremy Jay

by LORRAINE CARPENTER

“Who cares about MTV?” asks Jeremy Jay, West Coast pop singer-songwriter extraordinaire. “It’s just another lame excuse for a TV station.”

Jay prefers his very own channel, on YouTube of course, where one of his videos (“Airwalker”) has been viewed over 10,000 times. Not bad for a young independent artist, whose debut LP on K Records, A Place Where We Could Go, was released only two months ago. With a bio that reads like a personals ad—fawning over his height, hair colour and general handsomeness—and tastes that range from the “Forbidden Hollywood” melodramas of the early 1930s to 1950s rock ’n’ roll to the teen flicks and technology of the 1980s, Jay is probably more enamoured with cheesy romance, nostalgia and pop than your average indie kid. The man from Angel Town, California—playing Montreal for the first time this weekend, with a three-piece backing band—spoke to the Mirror from Arlington, Virginia, before breakfast and in the company of a giggling entourage.

Mirror: How did you get your start in music?

Jeremy Jay: In the third grade, I kinda accidentally wandered into the music room in the middle of a lesson and started taking trumpet for, like, three years. Then, in sixth grade, I was watching a movie called La Bamba starring Lou Diamond Philips and I was totally inspired. My aunt Patty, who’s a nun, bought me the sheet music for La Bamba and then I got some Buddy Holly and Richie Valens tapes and learned the guitar. Eventually, when I was 16, I started a band. It was rock kinda music, sorta.

M: I read somewhere that you’re fluent in French.

JJ: Yeah, my mom was Swiss so it’s Swiss French, which is basically the same as French French. Up until I was 13, we spoke it exclusively in the house. My mom only spoke French and my dad wanted to encourage it, so I could not speak English to either of them, even though we lived in Southern California. At the time, I hated it, but in retrospect, I think it’s really awesome. French is one of my most favourite languages in the world. I’m rusty right now ’cause I’m not around it—I live in the U.S., no one speaks French, are you kidding me? But I could easily get back into it. I actually recorded a song in French, and I was going to do [a version of] Airwalker in French but I ran out of studio time.

M: I understand that another record of yours, Dreamland, was intended to be a soundtrack.

JJ: It was made as a music movie—the concept was to make a soundtrack that was a movie, so the song titles and the songs themselves would be like scenes. Then we tried to make a movie to it and it just never materialized. It was a big project. I realized that I always have a lot of movie ideas and the best way to do it is to put it in music. You know Books on Tape? It’s like movies on tape. I’ve recorded, onto cassette tapes, movies. Like The Goonies. And sometimes I just listen to it. That’s what this has become.

With Hexes and Ohs at
Zoobizarre on Sunday,
July 20, 9 p.m., $10