Name: JOBS
Members: Max Jaffe (drums), Ro(b) Lundberg (bass), Jessica Pavone (viola), Dave Scanlon (guitar, vocals)
Nationality: American
Current release: JOBS's Soft Sounds is out via Ramp Local.

If you enjoyed this JOBS interview and would like to stay up to date with the band, their music and tour dates, visit them on Instagram, Facebook, and twitter. Also, more information can be found on the individual homepages of the group members: Max Jaffe; Ro(b) Lundberg; Jessica Pavone; Dave Scanlon

For an even deeper look into her thoughts, visit our earlier Jessica Pavone interview.



Where does the impulse to create something come from for you? What role do often-quoted sources of inspiration like dreams, other forms of art, personal relationships, politics etc play?

Questions like this can be complex for JOBS because it is a collaborative endeavor. We all might be inspired differently and separately: by a wandering mind, shifts in weather, individual and societal relations. Day-to-day work on this music sometimes leads to something interesting, but there are many fragments and uninspired moments that don’t get shared.

However, it is interesting and appropriate to think of this in the context of the band. The question of what creates a spark for JOBS is the idea that as a group we have more or different things to say, or that there are ideas that we individually have in mind that JOBS is the best conduit for.

Often this is kicked off by deciding when and how we will be creating music together. After we set a timeframe and place or method of collaborating, we begin exchanging ideas. We then combine, rework, and sketch out fuller song ideas based on what each other has shared.

Some songs have fairly specific sparks. “Opulent Fields” was written the day after the Borderline Bar & Grill shooting in California. The song is rather direct in its content.

In another example, Ro(b)’s family shares a precious copy of On Photography by Susan Sontag. Dave knew this, read the book, and some of the lyrical ideas on Soft Sounds come from thinking through those ideas and translating them into our own personal frameworks. This comes up most directly in “List the Creator Twice Part 1” and “List the Creator Twice Part 2”.

While there is not always a throughline inspiring one song to the next, what persists is the interest in continuing to cross pollinate our ideas into something unique to JOBS.
 
For you to get started, do there need to be concrete ideas – or what some have called a 'visualisation' of the finished work? What does the balance between planning and chance look like for you?

There is nearly always a sketch or initial idea that starts the process, though it is usually very very far from fleshed out. It may be a written out melody or chords, maybe an electronic beat. Usually the distance between the idea and early demos provides a liminal space that JOBS can exploit collaboratively to arrive at something wholly new. That space can be pulled and teased apart and new music can be found in there.

For example, in “A Toast” Ro brought in the drum groove and viola melody. This was enough to build from, bringing in different layers, instruments, and and Dave‘s commanding vocals to fully realize the piece.



Conversely, “Nite” started as an electronic drum improvisation that Max created and thought needed a vocal. Dave added vocals but also created an entirely new section and reworked the song’s form. This led Max to strip away many of the original elements of the beat and arrange the remaining elements more methodically throughout the piece, to highlight Dave’s structural changes.



There was something still missing though, a more distinct melodic element to hang Dave’s ethereal vocals on. Ro identified and tastefully filled in this gap with lead electric bass and subtle synth gestures. What results is something none of us would have created on our own.

Alternatively, there are a few examples of songs being fully improvised. “List the Creator Twice Part 2” is a recording of a live improvisation, including the vocals.



“List the Creator Twice Part 1” is a condensed, rerecorded version of the song we improvised in ”Part 2“.



Earlier in the band‘s history, the pieces were frequently fully written out prior to getting together as a band. In these cases the composing individual would bring in a score for individuals to read from and the band would collaborate on arrangement, timbre, overall arc—sometimes making subtle changes, sometimes radically reworking the original composition. This is the case for “Held Up Fairly”, “Threes”, “SFFS”, and others.
 


When do the lyrics enter the picture? Where do they come from? Do lyrics need to grow together with the music or can they emerge from a place of their own?

This differs song to song. Often we develop lyrics in parallel with musical ideas, but not tied together at first. As ideas develop, it becomes more clear what sounds and words work together, and both elements are reworked in consideration of the other. One person might provide the initial lyrical ideas, and another the music. Some grow from dreams, some from experiences in one of our lives, some from wrestling with broader social questions.

In “You Are the Object”, Jessica provided stanzas of lyrics and Ro provided initial instrumental ideas. As the band began fleshing out the music into a coherent instrumental track, Ro realized the natural fit with Jess’s words, distilling and rearranging the words and music to better fit each other. Max capped this off with production that hung words and all the other sounds together.



The result is a track that turns a club banger on its head – with slowly shifting, chanting vocals and interlocking electronic drums and guitars pushing the beat until the track gets enveloped by a melting fretless guitar solo.
 
From your experience, are there things you're doing differently than most or many other artists when it comes to writing music?

Through years of collaboration, JOBS has developed a unique compositional process and voice. While one or two people might bring in the initial skeleton, final songs always end up sounding like JOBS.

To get there, we are unafraid to radically deconstruct, rearrange, cut instruments or sections, pair what at first seemed like unrelated pieces, and mix parts contrary to accepted wisdom or our own best judgment. We don’t employ these techniques to force a strict uniformity across our songs. Instead, this approach leads us to diverse song collections that still hang together and seem to create singular experiences for listeners.

Because much of our collaboration in recent years is long-distance and our desire to continue making work has led us to keep shifting and adapting our workflow, we’re constantly putting ourselves in a position to keep creative sparks firing.

It’s actually been a long time since we’ve worked out new music while playing our instruments, and, from what one can tell via your run-of-the-mill rock doc, a lot of tension within bands can come from people’s contributions being limited to their onstage musical territory.

Max plays drums on stage but yet feels like this is the best music we’ve ever made, despite drum performances being largely minimized across the record. We’re most able to contribute the full breadth of our musicianship individually and collectively in our present workflow, despite rarely occupying the same physical space anymore.

“A Toast”, from 2020’s endless birthdays, started as a short snippet of interlocking rhythms based on the beeps of medical machines Ro groggily heard when waking from a surgery. Once in the hands of the rest of the band, others exchanged and expanded parts, adding new textures and Dave‘s centrally important vocals that made the whole song hang together in the contorted techno of the finished track.
 
Often, while writing, new ideas and alternative roads will open themselves up, pulling and pushing the creator in a different direction. Does this happen to you, too, and how do you deal with it? What do you do with these ideas?

JOBS has always been interested in arriving at music that is carefully constructed, while allowing for discoveries and unintended realizations to work their way in. Over the years, we have embraced more and more that we can radically edit and rework the ideas we each bring into the JOBS space.

In a way, the process is to take the initial idea and seek the “alternative road” within it. This continually results in work we are surprised and excited by.

For example, “Allure” began as an idea Rob brought to a different project. It didn’t fit there, so Ro recognized it for JOBS. After fleshing out the instrumental idea into a full track in the studio, the band didn’t feel like the song was formed yet. Max and Ro radically cut the track down to the most compelling parts. Ro then built keyboards and vocals on this distillation, braiding together lines of lyrics from Jessica and themself.



Once Ro(b) shared what they thought was a nearly finished version back with the band, Max again reworked the form and production, leading to the entrancing and slowly unfolding parable you now hear on the record.
 
Once a piece is finished, how important is it for you to let it lie and evaluate it later on? How much improvement and refinement do you personally allow until you're satisfied with a piece? What does this process look like in practise?

JOBS understands and appreciates that our songs are not fixed. Some songs are crafted individually, then brought to the group to arrange, edit, and radically rework.

Some start written as music notes on paper, others as rough audio demos, and some as only lines of text. Other songs are written collaboratively–improvised, refined, and pieced together in the practice room or the studio. When recording a song, production also becomes a key focus. A song can reveal a new self through layering, processing, and/or removing instruments, voices, sounds.

It can be hard to tell when a piece is finished, and letting it lie and evaluating later can be an essential part of arriving at completion. A lot of the music on Soft Sounds went through three or four significant stages of development, and each stage contained a flurry of activity to make major strides in composition, recording, arrangement, and mix. In between each stage, we largely put the music down so that we can approach the next step with a certain amount of creative freshness.

Then, when playing songs live, they continue to grow and take shape with each performance, something arriving in new places we never planned. It’s exciting and continually reinvigorating to see how our songs can take on multiple different “finished” states.

When we finally had to say “we’re done” with Soft Sounds at the end of 2022, we might have felt that there were tweaks left and it could’ve gone through  even more mix revisions before mastering. But now, with distance, we love the record as it is, for what it is, what it captures, and its many idiosyncrasies.

Soft Sounds includes the songs “List the Creator Twice Parts 1 & 2”. Part 2 is an excerpt of an improvised studio jam from early in the recording sessions for the album – it is simultaneously a complete, focused composition and a jagged, slowly-unspooling journey. Conversely, Part 1 is the boiled down radio edit, with tight sections and clean transitions.

Both are the song, and presented on opposite ends of the record, the pair expand the possibilities of all the songs on the record.
 
What's your take on the role and importance of production, including mixing and mastering for you personally? How involved do you get in this?

It’s extremely important, as it encompasses how everything that is written and recorded is presented to the listener.

Personally, Max felt a somewhat natural segue from performing and thinking a great deal about the overall sound of the group from the perspective of the drumset to producing and mixing the group’s recorded material and translating this perspective to the recorded form.

All music is reflective of the technological trends of the time - in fact, many technological trends of a time period first appear in its popular music - and with JOBS, we have always been interested in finding and presenting radical ways of pushing our work forward. Embracing production through technology to develop a musical vocabulary - like each one of us has done on our instruments - is a natural evolution of this impulse.

One of Max‘s favorite examples of this on the record is “List The Creator Twice, Part II”. The circumstances of its creation incorporate both improvisational instincts and meticulously sculpted production gestures. The recording is different from the rest of the record, being the only piece recorded as one live full band take (a recording that began after the band had actually tuned up and begun playing). He had everyone record into the same set of effects, flattening various sounds into one layer.

These kinds of techniques found their way into arrangements and mixes throughout the rest of the record, and this piece was where impulses and ideas were first tested.
 
After finishing a piece or album and releasing something into the world, there can be a sense of emptiness. Can you relate to this – and how do you return to the state of creativity after experiencing it?

Yes, it’s a tremendous amount of work to put together and publicly share an album. It can be both relieving and difficult to wrap that process and return to the blank page.

One thing that keeps JOBS returning with new creativity is the fact that each of us is involved in many other projects–musical and otherwise. While every member of JOBS is a regular collaborator with many other folx, we each maintain solo practices where we continue to explore new ideas compositionally and as performers.

This solo work continues to refresh and inform JOBS each time we reconvene to create music together again.