Seb Isaac

Photo Credit John Roberts

Catch up with singer-songwriter Seb Issac and listen to his latest single "It Feels Good" off his forthcoming EP.

What got you interested in music?

Seb Isaac: My Dad used to put Walkman headphones against my mothers belly when she was pregnant with me. I’d like to think that’s where the fascination with music since birth came from.

Do you remember the first song you wrote?

Yeah… It was horrendous. I made a vow to myself that I would never show that mess to anyone but my kids in the future, just to show them that no one’s perfect, even their dad...

Which musicians have you been influenced by?

When I started playing guitar Randy Rhodes was my Idol, then Jimmy Page for the majority of my teenage years. Once I got into songwriting however I appreciated composition a lot more and started listening to John Mayer, Dave Matthews, The Strokes, Tame Impala. Broad spectrum I know, but I love everything.

If you were to make a playlist to share with your fans, which three songs - from other artists - would you have to include?

"Let It Happen" – Tame Impala

"Bounce Back" – Big Sean (Especially if you’re in the dumps)

"Careless Whisper" – George Michael (RIP)

How would you describe your sound to someone who had never heard your music?

I guess my music is a balance between Soft, Acoustic, and Pop Rock...I’ll just keep playing/writing and let the industry decide.

What were your inspirations behind your single "It Feels Good"?

I had this melody I was working on with my loop pedal, which ended up being the chorus to the song. Once I had the lyrics for the chorus it made sense what the song was about. Back in college I got stuck in the routine of choosing quick fixes like a fun night out, sex, drugs, alcohol and even just being lazy (i.e. watching Netflix, scrolling through reddit, etc.) over focusing on writing music and working towards my dreams. It happens to everyone... So I made a song out of it.

Do you have plans to release an album or EP?

I do! I have a 5 song EP all ready recorded (including “It Feels Good). It’s just been a matter of mixing it to sound right. Release date TBA!!!

What do you hope listeners are able to take away from your music?

Honestly, I'm not sure. What drew me to songwriting was the fact that a song could amplify my feelings out of nowhere. I could get lost in a song. A song could be about heartbreak but the melody and energy of it would make me smile about a good moment I’ve had in a past relationship. I guess in the end, I just hope my songs make you smile, cry, laugh, or just feel anything, because it’d be an honor to be a part of someone’s day like that.

Is there anything you want to add?

To anyone reading this… Stay sexy and stop texting your exes.

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Time King

Catch up with prog-rock 5 piece Time King's Brandon Dove and watch the video for their new single "Main Street", part of their The 1955 Collection.

What brought you together and got you interested in starting Time King?

Brandon: This is actually an interesting story. I met Shayne in 2009, as a matter of fact - which is a lot longer ago now than I'd like - at a Berklee College of Music Summer program. We met, became friends, totally hit it off, and we both had plans to return there in the Fall for college in 2010 and start a little project. He's from California and he ended up going there to Boston in 2010; I ended up staying local on Long Island - which is where the rest of us are from, New York - and one thing led to another and even though we were not at the same school, we were on the same coast, and he hit me up and he was like, "hey, let's do this". So, for about a year, we were just traveling back and forth making music over iChat or traveling between Boston and New York and kind of just shelving some ideas and putting out a few covers. We had the help of a couple of friends who would become the band members, so by 2012 is when we actually committed to being Time King, being a band, and I guess that's the moment when we really came together. This thing that preexisted, Shayne and mine's little project, became Time King. The two friends, Kalvin and James, who were helping us demo and helping us do covers ended up taking it on and we found our drummer, conveniently, on YouTube and he became one of our best fiends; and that's kind of the mixing pot that made the Time King cake that you see before you [laughs].

Where does your name, Time King, come from?

It actually is just a very, very well-timed - but mistakenly typed - text message. It was a text message typo that we ended up using as a joke and then when we came back and tried to think seriously about a band name and revisited it, our serious efforts could not top the convention of the one that we didn't take seriously. It stuck, it worked, it was easy, there were links for it, and I guess that would set the scene for how we operate best, which is, we operate best when we don't take ourselves too seriously and that's represented in the band name.

Which musicians have you been influenced by, individually or as a band?

There's definitely a big ol' list that all of us are influenced by and it's kind of interesting and unique. We love Esperanza Spalding, Incubus, Jamiroquai, and some of us on the Long Island side of things definitely come from those roots like Glassjaw, The Mars Volta, Rx Bandits; it's a solid mix. It's interesting, but that's one of the things where, when we found Goose for example - we found him on YouTube and we were able to distinguish that he was a local dude who was just doing killer drum covers - I think one of the things that really made us connect with him, before we even met him, was just that he was like, "in case you're curious, I'm going to give you my Last.fm playlist of things I dig," and the list was like Esperanza Spalding followed by Kimbra, Dillinger Escape Plan, Meshuggah, Alien Ant Farm, and Periphery followed by some jazz or pop. It was such a strange list that it was scary how close it was to the artists that we love, even though all of the artists were like two different sides of the spectrum. That set the scene for us connecting with him and we share a lot of that.

Is there an artist you've been hooked on lately?

Yeah, yeah, definitely. A big one for us lately has been the newest Anderson .Paak album and it just came out last year, in 2016. He's kind of an emerging hip hop artist that we really dig who has roots in gospel music, which we love; he's a drummer himself and he sings and he raps and he's super good, so we've been on that, lately. It's heartbreaking and inspiring to watch his interviews and hear his story.

Which words would you use to describe your own sound?

It's funny, 'cause you kind of talk about these things and it becomes these unanimous jokes that we end up really committing to. It doesn't matter who you ask, you definitely would get the same thing. We started creating this little quote, like, it's music for your inner nerd and your inner party girl [laughs]. 

What were your inspirations behind this new single "Main Street"?

It's a stand-alone single, technically, but it's actually the first piece of a giant project that we'll be exploring for the next year or two. We've coined that a project because it's not necessarily an album, it's a collection of 4 EPs with singles in-between with "Main Street" being the first. We're calling the entire collection The 1955 Collection, actually. "Main Street" is going to be followed up in Spring with the Frontierland EP. It's exciting - and a little scary - because it's the first step in this big direction that we've been conceptualizing for a little while now and it's the first impression; we're confident at this point that it sums up all the different things that we're trying to accomplish with this project, like a little overture.

While the track is an introduction, the influence kind of comes from this idea that I think is pretty prevalent amongst our generation which is, it seems that people these days are very addicted to nostalgia. They love the '90s throwback and everywhere you go there's either a reboot of an old TV show or movie, or a comeback, or a throwback and it makes you think about nostalgia. "Main Street" is centered around that, along with this idea of how nostalgia can be something that you can become addicted to; you get enamored with it, then you become addicted to it and maybe, in a way, you alienate yourself from it because you say, "I can't live in the past, it's not real, I have reality to deal with," and the song depicts that. By the end of the song, it rethinks that to embrace the idea that that magic you feel, that nostalgic vibe that you get when you think of certain things that make you feel that way, they are part of your reality and part of who you are. You'll see in the video and the song that we iterate that. Even the title, "Main Street", is named after Disney Land, and that's a place you go that, no matter when you come back to it, you're always a kid. It's a song about someone or something - it could be a person, a significant other, a place - and it's that process and magic you feel when someone or something makes you feel like a kid again. You say to yourself, "it's not real, it's fantasy," and no, it is real, and toying with that.

Could you tell our readers more about The 1955 Collection?

It's definitely a process that I could say is continually unfolding; we've only written part of it so far and it's a continual discovery, but there's definitely some parts of it that are set in stone. All the stuff I just said about "Main Street" kind of sums up what the entire collection is going to discover through different iterations, but one of the other pieces behind the concept is just finding a format for us to release music that is different from saying 'album'. To release a collection - we have the single "Main Street" and Frontierland which is a 3 song EP, for now - it's a chance for us to put stuff out quicker, put out smaller pockets of music where we can put more focus on the song while, at the same time, letting things group themselves into a bigger mass over time. Some songs will either stand on their own or get grouped into EPs periodically and, eventually, those EPs will find themselves grouped into this giant mass; they're kind of independent but they're also related. One of the ways that they're related is that each of the EPs are going to explore different musical and conceptual aesthetics for us. Like, when I named our influences, we have so many different musical influences that we mashed together and I guess you could say we're still doing that mashing, but we'll definitely have a deliberate exploration of some of those assets. I can already say, off the bat, that Frontierland is the most rugged, rock-oriented of the collection whereas other ones might focus on different elements of our sound in a more exclusive way.

Is there one track you've been working on that you're most excited to share with fans?

It's interesting, because the timeline has been strange up to this point. Because the concept builds upon itself, some of the songs on the EP, we've been working on for the greater part of a year and the most recent song we actually wrote was "Main Street" and we wrote that in September or October. Our bass player, James, is our engineer, but he also works for Dream Theater on the road and he'll be away for 6 weeks, then he'll be back, then he'll be away; it's forced us into this new format for the band where we act quick and we adapt. With "Main Street", in September we decided we wanted to write a song and so we did it in 10 days: we wrote it from scratch and then demoed it, tracked it, mixed it, and mastered it all within 10 days before James went away. So "Main Street", because it's the most recent one we wrote and it sums a lot of stuff up, so we're most pumped about that, at least currently.

In one sentence, how would you sum up The 1955 Collection?

It's a chance for us to explore a number of different musical, lyrical, and conceptual ideas all under one umbrella.

What do you hope listeners are able to take away from your music?

I think one of our goals - for this song or this collection or the upcoming EP and our music as a whole - when we make that joke about music for your inner nerd or party girl and we call ourselves party prog, I think what we want the takeaway to be is that we're definitely brainy, nerdy people - we love video game culture and a majority of us went to school for music or audio-engineering - and it informs what we do and definitely defines that progressive element of what we do. In terms of a traditional, progressive band - where it's all about the 20 minute songs with tons of technicality, some people would argue, to a fault - I think what we want for our music is, we want people to take as much as they want to take. If you're someone who really digs nuance and you really dig complexity and love listening to the details of the composition, we would love for people to get pumped about that because we're pumped about that; about dissecting every song and understanding the chord changes and the relations between musical themes and key changes and rhythmic elements that are related. We would love for people who are pumped about that but, at the same time, we love a song with lyrics that people can relate to and it's something for someone that's positive and that makes them think about something in a certain way. Or, on a surface level, for a person who's not interested in the musical/technical stuff or deep lyrics, maybe they're just interested in a song that they love to blast in their car that's just catchy and accessible and feel-good. There's all these different levels and there's no hierarchy to these levels, they're just different interactions. I guess what we'd love for people to take from our music is something that gets them pumped on any level, whether its on the surface or deep, as long as they take something passionate from it.

Is there anything you want to add?

I could rant about plenty of topics [laughs]. I think we just love what we do and maybe it's just a vibe thing but, ideally, if people hear the passion in it and it gets them pumped, that's what's awesome. All 5 of us love art that inspires us to do something or think about something - that's why we do this - and music is a chance to think about things, meet cool people, go to cool places, and learn everything and there's parts of life that are not so great, so you've got to really grab the stuff that is great and create other great things with it.

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The Cuckoos

Catch up with Austin-based neo-psych rock band The Cuckoos and listen to their single "Mind Breakthrough" off their upcoming debut self-titled EP.

What got you interested in starting The Cuckoos?

Kenneth: Well, in high school I started playing piano and taught myself by ear and I was just jamming around with people that I was friends with at school and stuff - nothing serious. After a while, I decided I wanted to start doing music seriously so I started writing some songs and I started the group with just a drummer that I was playing with that I went to high school with and I think it was our second gig that Dave attended.

Dave: We were just both on the same bill with different artists. I stuck around and I ended up seeing The Cuckoos play and I was like, "man, I really dig these guys". I bought their demo album.

Kenneth: We had been a band for 2 or 3 months, something like that, and we just had a bill with this band that Dave was playing in, so then he saw us play and we stole him.

Dave: I know that you wanted to form this band after you saw Tame Impala at ACL and that was really therocket ship.

Kenneth: Yeah, 'cause I saw Tame Impala and they were doing that new rock and roll/old school/psychedelic thing - they're kind of changing it up now - but I figured if they could do that kind of stuff then I could do it, so that was the inspiration, I guess. Me and Dave started playing together.

Dave: Like the very next day after we played that little show.

Kenneth: And then we've hung out every day since then. We're like best friends.

Dave: Nah.

[Laughter]

Which musicians would you say you've been influenced by?

Kenneth: Oh man, we listen to everybody.

Dave: As far as guitar players go, I like Beck and Randy Rhoads and David Gilmour; a lot of old school artists. And my favorite band's Pink Floyd and I'm really into '90s music, so the Pixies are in there and I think Black Francis is one of the best songwriters out there and, honestly, he's always been my hero. Pretty much anything we can snag at the record store.

Kenneth: I started getting into really early Beatles stuff and then, as I got into the Beatles' career, they got a little more psychedelic towards the end, so then I started listening to music that was like that and I guess I kind of slowly went through the decades. I'm kind of in an '80s phase right now. After a little while, I got into Joy Division, The Talking Heads and, like Dave, I like Pink Floyd, a lot.

Dave: We've been gelling on the same kind of bands. We've been real into Talking Heads lately and those have really fueled a lot of the songs that we've been writing and jamming on with our own stuff.

Kenneth: The Doors were a huge influence for us. I listened to them a lot when I was learning how to play keyboards and they had such a strong lead keyboard player that I picked up a lot on that. And then Prince, I've been obsessed with Prince lately; he's my man. And Rick James. Yeah, we listen to everything. And then modern bands too, like Tame Impala; really like Mac DeMarco.

Dave: Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats. Windhand is another great band.

Kenneth: Just recently, Dave showed me Connan Mockasin and then I heard this group called TOPS that I've been listening to, they're really good.

Dave: TOPS is really good.

If you had to choose a favorite artist right now, who would that be?

Dave: Pink Floyd or The Pixies. Or it could be The Smashing Pumpkins, too. I love Smashing Pumpkins.

Kenneth: I'd say Joy Division and Prince. It changes a lot for us.

Dave: We discover a new band and it literally becomes our new flame. Literally, I've been only listening to The Flaming Lips recently; they've been such an inspiration to me lately and their stage shows are insane and they have such a true and honest, just righteous, pretty wacky show. They literally give it their all on every single song and that's something that not a lot of people do. They have a lot of killer songs and you listen to The Flaming Lips and they're just giving 100%, 100% of the time

How would you describe your own sound to someone who had never heard your music?

Kenneth: I think a lot of our influences come out in our music, so I think combining some of the artists we just listed for you. I think we sound like The Doors and Prince and Joy Division [laughs].

Dave: Pink Floyd is a really big influence.

Kenneth: I definitely say we're a rock and roll group with psychedelic influences and funk influences, but we're just us making our music. And that's definitely been influenced by the music we listen to, the experiences we've had in our lives, the people we've met, the relationships we've had; just all sorts of that kind of stuff plays a factor into it. But it's easiest to just say we're a rock and roll group.

Could you tell us more about your upcoming EP and how it'll compare to your previous singles?

Kenneth: We've gone through a lot of changes in the past. We've had lineup changes of different members and me and Dave have stuck along since the beginning. We've got a lot of music that we've worked on, we've got a whole bunch of songs - a lot of stuff we recorded that we haven't released and a lot of stuff that we haven't recorded that we play at live shows. We just spent the last two years starting the band, getting on our feet, getting a solid sound, getting a bunch of material to choose from, and now we feel it's time to finally release something and we've decided to do an EP. It's going to consist of 6 songs. A couple of the songs, I put on SoundCloud and you're able to listen to them right now, but it's just that same kind of groovy sound.

Dave: The stuff that we've released on SoundCloud is way more of the funkier side and it's way more easy to grasp. The stuff that we're putting on the EP is a little bit more epic, so to speak, and we're trying to really push ourselves.

Kenneth: Yeah. It's a little more moody.

Dave: Maybe a little heavier.

Kenneth: So yeah, we just took these 6 songs and we're planning on releasing them digitally, on CD, and on vinyl, so we should have all that soon. We tried to go very cosmic with it, I think [laughs]. Our goal with it was just to make people feel something. We want people to feel either good or bad, either way.

Dave: Feel the same way we felt when we wrote the songs.

You've got some showcases coming up at SXSW, do you have a favorite song to play live?

Kenneth: We do a cover of "When Doves Cry" by Prince sometimes and that's fun to play. We do "Shadowplay" by Joy Division too and that's fun. Of our own songs, I don't know. They're all fun. "A Little Bit Funky" is really fun to play and "Mind Breakthrough", that's going to be one of the songs on the EP coming out. That was one of the earliest songs we wrote and we've been playing that since, probably, our first show I played that song. It's just a very rock and roll, upbeat, fast tempo, but it's just a long section.

Dave: We get in this orbit around the song.

Kenneth: [Laughs] Yeah, there's this section in the middle where we can all just jam and do whatever we want for awhile and, in that, we can do a lot of improvisational stuff and that's really the funnest time live, is just jamming. I really like listening to Dave play guitar live, too [laughs].

Dave: And I just got a new keytar and it's sounding killer. That song, we can do a lot of experiments with; we can really just take our boundaries and cut them loose.

Kenneth: It's also good with songs like that 'cause if we are at the end of a set and we've got 5 minutes left, we can play the song; but if we're at the end of the set and we've got 15 minutes left, we can still play "Mind Breathrough" and just really drag it out and jam on it for a while. It's fun doing stuff like that when we have the time.

Do you have one track from this upcoming EP that you're most excited to release?

Dave: I'm really excited to release the track "You're Going To Work For Us".

Kenneth: Yeah, I'd say that one too. The song called "You're Going To Work For Us Until The Day You Die". I wrote it right before I dropped out of college.

Dave: It's got really great charisma, as far as being a kid in school and being like, "man, I really have to force myself to be here".

Kenneth: Yeah, I feel like that's something me and Dave have a shared feeling of. I started working on music and really focusing on that as my goal in life and I feel like I've accomplished a lot in a short period of time and it's like, man, you get a little jaded sometimes, but I spent so much time sitting in classrooms learning about stuff that I didn't really need to know-

Dave: Man, those SATs!

[Laughter]

Kenneth: I could've been out viewing the world and experiencing stuff - especially at a young age!

Dave: I was in that high school period where they stopped doing TAKS testing and they started doing STAR testing and that was the worst. I feel like a lot of kids can relate to that.

Kenneth: So that song started out just as a jam that we were doing instrumentally at practice and then I was pretty much at the end of the road of my college experience [laughs]. I was sitting in class one day and I had the music stuck in my head so I came up with the words to it and it was just kind of a big "F you" to school. Then I immediately got up and just left the class and I unenrolled myself from college [laughs]. I think that song's got a cool sound and a cool vibe. I'm not saying people shouldn't go to school, it just wasn't right for me.

Dave: There's a lot of confidence in that song, but kids should stay in school.

[Laughter]

Kenneth: It's a very epic, slow, Pink Floyd-y, cosmic kind of jam. We've played it at live shows for quite a while and I think it's gotten a very good reaction and we haven't released any recordings of it, so I'm really excited to share that one with people.

In one sentence, how would you sum up this EP?

Dave: A box full of grooves.

[Laughter]

Kenneth: It's a cosmic, psychedelic journey through love and heartbreak-

Dave: And regret.

Kenneth: And regret, yeah.

What do you hope listeners are able to take away from your music?

Kenneth: I just feel like, and I've said this before to other people, there's definitely something that I think every avid music listener looks for when they're listening to music. It's the thing that makes your goosebumps pop and you get the hairs on the back of your neck and whenever you're down and you're sad - I feel like everyone's had those low times in life where it's just like you're bummed out and nothing seems to be going right - and I feel like music has always been there for me. Even if it's the most dark, depressing music that just makes me feel so sad and down, sometimes the fact that someone else felt that and it's there and they portrayed it and I can relate to it, that makes me feel something, and I want to be able to recreate - not necessarily a negative feeling like that - but I want to create some sort of feeling, whether it's happy or moody or down or gloomy. I just want people to be able to feel something.

Dave: There's always a part of the song where there's this unexplained, open-endedness that we can all relate to. There's this underlying question and it's like, we're doing the best we can to put it in our songs and give you that kind of persona.

Kenneth: We're trying to make something that people can relate to, for sure.

Dave: Step on in and walk a mile in our shoes.

Kenneth: Yeah, walk in our shoes a little.

Is there anything you want to add?

Kenneth: Stay tuned and keep your eyes peeled, 'cause we've got a lot coming.

Dave: Physically peel your eyes.

[Laughter]

Dave: You're not a real fan if you're not peeling your eyes back. We hope to do a lot of face melting and eye-popping.

Kenneth: Grooving. Yeah. We want some mind breakthroughs and explosions.

Dave: But not diarrhea.

[Laughter]

Kenneth: None of that.

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Armond Jason

Catch up with singer-songwriter Armond Jason and listen to "Monster" and watch the video for his single "I Know", both off his upcoming album The Gold Album: Signature, to be released in April.

What got you interested in music?

Armond: It's just been something since I was a kid, randomly I've always liked singing and stuff. Actually, one day I was at Kings Dominion in Virginia and a guy was doing a drawing and he was, "what do you want to be when you grow up?" and I said, "a singer" [laughs]. That was like the first thing that came to mind and I've always loved music and I picked up how to play stuff by ear on piano when I was a kid, so it's always just been one of those things.

Do you remember the first song you wrote?

I am not entirely sure, to be honest. I started making original songs back in high school but I was in a band so it was more of a collaborative effort but in the meantime I had wrote stuff on my own... I have it on my computer, I'm sure, somewhere - 'cause I have thousands [laughs] of songs that I've written and instrumentals that I've composed - but it's really hard to tell. I can't really think of it!

Which musicians have you been influenced by?

In general, I've grown up listening to all different types of music from Motown and everything. But, when people ask, the three musicians I take something from is not necessarily the sound of their music, but one is Jay Z, two is Linkin Park, and three is Prince. For Jay Z, the reason why I like what he does is the fact that, not only is he considered one of the best rappers that ever lived, but it's his business sense; the thing is, I wanted to know more about the business, I went to Full Sail University to try to pick up stuff, I watched interviews, and I've thrown shows, managed artists for a bit in Richmond - which was annoying [laughs] - but that was all things from him. With Linkin Park, that has to do more directly with how I write because I've always liked the fact that they took rock and rap and they combined it so, when I make my music and the sound sounds completely different from everything that's out there, there's little things here and there that sounds familiar just because I draw from certain types of artists or certain categories of music and I mold it into my own style. And then Prince, he's more of a comparison that I get just because I play guitar and keyboard and all that stuff; and some people say I kind of look like him [laughs]. I'd say those three, in general, tend to be what influences me for all sides of things.

Is there a new artist you've been listening to that you'd recommend everyone take a listen to?

I don't know [laughs], besides myself! [Laughs] Actually, an interesting thing, my cousin who is married, apparently Chance the Rapper is his nephew. I thought that was interesting that that would pop up, because he shared a thing from the Grammy's on his Facebook and he was like, "yeah, shout out to my family," and I was like, "oh, what the hell?" [laughs]. Definitely go check out Chance the Rapper's stuff, shout out to that.

Which words would you use to describe your own sound?

I would describe my sound as 'me' [laughs], but if I were to give it a category, alternative pop. If I had to break down what it was, the instrumentals kind of have that mix between an EDM and a hip hop sound to it, 'cause I use electronic music. But my voice, it sounds more rock-ish than R&B, so they are already so apart: I don't fall into an R&B category, but I do rap too, so I say alternative because I can bend my music to how I want it, which is what I've been doing for years [laughs]. The main thing is the core of the writing and making sure that the music is right, because I've always had this theory that, as long as it sounds good, people will definitely be into it and they'll like it, at the end of the day.

What were your inspirations behind your single "Monster"?

It was a situation that happened years ago, actually and, being that I got better at writing and composing - the sound of it, when I created the instrumental, it sounds like something that you'd hear in a monster movie [laughs], like with werewolves or Dracula - I was like, alright, I have that particular sound because of the instrumentation that I used, so let me speak on this incident. Long story short, I dated this girl that I hung out with with a group of people, we all had the same mutual friends, and when things weren't going so well, everybody took her side, of course - which is understandable, because the dudes are always wrong apparently [laughs] - and that's pretty much what happened. People that I used to hang out with all the time, I ended up not hanging out with them anymore, but out of it, three of my closest friends to this day stuck by my side - which is cool - but essentially it led to me writing "Monster". Interesting experience but I learned, don't date a girl that has a bunch of mutual friends [laughs].

Is that single indicative of what we can expect to hear on your upcoming album and could you tell us more about The Gold Album: Signature?

Well, hmm, that single is its own entity. One thing about my album is, when you hear the songs, they all have their own particular sound to them. When people are like, "can we expect more like what it is?" as for craftsmanship, yes but sound, not quite. There are some things I do that tie in each and every song, 'cause the instrumentals all sound different. Because you know, you listen to a trap album or an EDM album and most of the instrumentals - and a lot of stuff nowadays - sound exactly the same, but I wanted to make everything different than how people have been doing it. A big influence I like is how Prince made his stuff; I liked how Michael Jackson had every song that was different, I felt like that was something that needed to be done to keep having people feel refreshed as they listened to the album. So that's pretty much what it is. I have another song, just to gauge what I mean, and music video that's out right now that's also going to be on the album called "I Know". You can listen to those two and you can definitely be like, alright, I see what you mean by how certain things tie together because of the vocals and so forth, but the instrumental is completely different.

Is there a song off the album you're most excited to share?

Besides all of them [laughs] there are actually two. One I just finished and will end up being premiered, it's called "I'm The Man"; I just wrote it. And I'm working on another one that I'm putting on the album which is called "Never Gave Up" which I need to finish this week. I might actually write another new one, as well, because I had a bunch of songs, but then I was like, now that I have a bit more time to make stuff before the album actually drops in April, let me see what else I can put that might be better than some of the other ones that are on there. But definitely those two that I just did, "I'm The Man" and "Never Gave Up", those are straight fire [laughs].

In one sentence, how would you sum up The Gold Album: Signature?

I could probably use one word [laughs]. Immaculate.

It's going to be great and I think people are going to really enjoy it.

What do you hope listeners are able to take away from your music?

The biggest thing is that, hopefully, they relate; whether it to be the situation - not so much for my sake - but so they understand how to get through it. A lot of the tracks on there are ego-boosting, they help boost your self esteem because, "Monster" for instance, it's like, "alright, consider me a monster, but I'll embrace it then," and that's part of what it is. When you accept certain things as being what they are, it makes it easier to move on and learn from your mistakes. That's essentially what I want people to understand.

Is there anything you want to add?

I would definitely say check out my music video for "I Know", it's actually doing fairly well. And all the information for my social media can be found through my website, which is www.armondjason.com. There's links to my Facebook, Instagram, Twitter; the music video's on there; I'll be selling the songs through there, too - and possibly on iTunes, down the line. For now, everything is through my website, so that's the best connection.

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