Interview: Jada Pierce

Jada Pierce, English Humanities teacher at Northwest Academy, led the life of a rock star before teaching. Throughout her childhood, Pierce developed skills and a passion for music. She joined and created various bands releasing albums such as, Freudian Slip of the Year and The Subtle Politics of the Public Hammock. Her post-punk rock-derived music, with Pierce on vocals and guitar, is a must hear.

Let’s start from the beginning. Where were you born, and where did you grow up?

I was born in Anderson, Ind. at Community Hospital. And I grew up in Pendleton. They are essentially the same town, except Pendleton is actually a lot smaller than Anderson. Anderson is where all the General Motors factories were that my family worked in. And Pendleton is a small farming town, much more rural. Downtown Pendleton has one stoplight that at 10 o’clock every night switches to a flashing yellow light. So that’s how small the town is where I grew up and went to high school. It wasn’t super small, the high school, though because they were pulling in students from the farming communities that were pretty far away, so I graduated from a class of a little over 200. But you had kids coming from pretty far to go there. It was a rural school.

Did you have music growing up in your house? Did you have a musical family?

Yeah. Not musical in that they played instruments. And I grew up in a fairly small home so there wasn’t any room for a piano or anything like that in the house, but my dad’s family, especially, were all singers. Mostly in church, so church singers and a lot of his family members like his aunts and uncles and some of his cousins have recorded records, like singing hymnals. And my grandma lived with us for part of my adolescence and she was really religious and sang a lot of religious songs constantly, just sort of in the background.

My parents had an amazing vinyl collection, like outside of religious music, just popular music. And both of my parents, especially my dad, even to this day, have retained an interest in current music, which I always really appreciated. He still buys music, so that’s nice to have had a parent who invested in music. Both my parents always sang around the house and there was always music playing. Then that, coupled with sort of the religious music that my grandmother was either singing or singing up at the church, you know up in front of the choir, and her sister played the organ at the church every Sunday. They recorded albums, not that really sold or anything, just among the church community. But still they were talented singers, her sisters in particular. Even when I was a little kid, I saw my grandma more than my mom. My daughter is named after my grandmother, Leora. She always encouraged me to sing and I had a little Casio keyboard that I got maybe when I was six. So I would play and compose songs on the keyboard, and I would write these plays and make the music to the plays, and my grandma was my only audience. She was really critical, but in a good way, you know? She didn’t just say, “That was wonderful.” I mean she was especially supportive, don’t get me wrong. She was grandma after all, I couldn’t do no wrong. But because she had a good ear for music she would always correct me or try to get me to redo things and really practice and develop my voice and my ability to learn and play from ear. Which is all I really ever learned how to do, is just play from ear. I played the keyboard from ear, I sang from ear, I would perform in church too, not the organ, but mostly just singing and then in elementary school and middle school, I sang in choir. I never played in band, the bands at my schools were pretty big, a lot of students.

Like ensembles or symphonies, or something like that?

Yeah, and marching bands. The band would play at the football games in high school. And they would have concerts, the way that we do around holidays. But they were large groups and I was intimidated because I didn’t really learn to read music. So I just continued playing at home by myself mostly, and for my grandmother and then maybe in front of the church. I did sing in the choir in school and really enjoyed that and often got solos. I would always get the solo xylophone part to play, too, because I had a good ear. Then I got a guitar when I was in high school and just started playing it on my own. I had a boyfriend who played guitar and he had lessons so he would kind of teach me some of what he knew, but I still just did better teaching myself.

When did you become a part of your first band?

So, actually, synonymous to meeting my husband, I went to see his band play at this little coffee shop. We were both in school at Purdue University in Indiana, and my roommate’s dad owned this little café. They had music three nights a week and so it was right down the street. We would go there because we could always get in for free. One night this band, Neeks, was playing, and [in] it was my husband [Eric Mellor]. Obviously, he wasn’t my husband at the time, I didn’t even know him, and his two best friends. It was the weirdest music I had ever heard. Growing up in Indiana and having such cultural limitations upon my musical exposure, it was just awesome to see them perform. There was no genre that they fit into and they were so bold and creative. Most people would have walked out of there hating it because it was not a genre, you couldn’t get your head around it. It was loud, it was noisy, it was raucous, it was you know… the post-punk stuff that I had been listening to and found and stumbled upon through my friend Jessica in high school. But also mildly offensive and just really fun. But humorous. So after the show I was just completely ecstatic like, “Who are you guys?” “This is amazing.” I introduced myself to them and started talking to Eric and told him I played guitar and sang. It kind of ended there.

And then it turned out, a couple of weeks later we saw each other at a mutual friend’s birthday party and the whole band was there. I ended up talking to all of them, especially Eric and I remember, this is when I met Eric so he took my phone number down on a pizza box lid. That’s kind of our story about how we met. So we kind of started dating and Eric realized that he really liked my voice and that I played guitar. He had been playing with these three guys since early high school. They started in a band called Flaming Nipple. So he was really looking to broaden their horizons a little bit and they were like: “Why not bring a chick into the band?” I was like, “I really like what they are doing and I’ve never really played music with other people, so as long as you don’t think this will screw things up for you guys I’m totally happy to see what happens.”

I owe my husband a lot of just encouraging me to play with other people for doing that. For a while, I thought that if I were to become a musician it would be a singer-songwriter, but now I prefer actually playing with other people. Playing music and writing music with other people. And, you know, almost every band that I’ve ever been in we have written solely collaboratively, which is not easy. A lot people who play music, one person kind of writes the music and then everybody else plays their part. It’s a process, it’s awesome, it’s this collaborative compromising artistic process that’s like none other and I really miss it.

Eric and I moved to Baltimore and right away basically started playing in this band that was way different than Neeks. Landing Mechanics was the first band that we were a part of in Baltimore. Again, I just sang and played a lot of percussion stuff. Not main drums but a lot of percussive instruments. And then really was like, “Okay, I want to play music in a rock ‘n’ roll band. I want to play guitar and sing and I want to be a primary song writer.” So then I just ended up forming my own band with people I met through the Baltimore scene playing and Landing Mechanics. That band was the Dolly Sods. We recorded an album called Freudian Slip of the Year and had a lot of fun playing around town. That’s when I really kind of came into my own as having an identity as a rock ‘n’ roll musician and front woman and playing guitar and soloing.

Did you continue music when you moved to Portland?

We moved out here and knew right away that we would have to play music. We put an ad on Craigslist for people who are open minded and interested in playing rock-derived music but we listed some influences. Obviously the Pixies. But actually I listened to Frank Black solo albums before I listened to the Pixies, honestly. But also Bruce Springsteen. We ended up meeting, because of a friend who we used to play with in Baltimore, Lou Thomas, who became the most awesome person available to play music with in Portland. So we met him through a friend and then on our Craigslist ad we tested out a few drummers and ended up meeting one and liking him and kind of went from there. That was Chores and we put out two albums and then we have material for a third album that we never put out. We recorded it but never finished all the recording. The band kind of dissipated. So we put out an album called Life is Hard and then we put out Public Hammock, which is what people called it but it was The Subtle Politics of the Public Hammock. That was a really fun album. We toured up and down the west coast playing small venues in college towns. But we also played in LA and San Diego, and we played in Reno, Nv.

So yeah we played shows until basically I got pregnant. That’s not why we stopped. It just so happened that when I got pregnant with Leora both our drummers at the time were just ready to move and ready to leave Portland and they moved very far away. So there was no really continuing the band at that point and I was getting ready to have my first baby, so priorities were shifting. I still play my guitar and sing. I don’t really perform for people, but I play for my kids. My husband and I often play for the kids. Because music is at our house constantly and I think both my kids definitely love music already. I would love to play music with a group of people again, though. That’s definitely been missing from my life and now that I have had my two kids and am not having anymore, I feel like I’m getting to a place where maybe I could play. I don’t know that I would play out you know, like perform. But record and just practice was always the most fun with Chores. We have our studio behind our house and just getting together two days a week and jamming for two or three hours is a lot of fun. It’s really good release.

So when you record, do you have your own recording studio or do you go to record somewhere else?

Well, when we were recording we had an actual double-walled studio in our backyard, and we used to have an analog recording setup. We had a digital recording set-up and we had a huge mixing table and an isolation booth back there, but we always recorded everything except the vocals live in that studio. We didn’t each do separate tracks or anything. I mean, we are all recording with our own microphones but it was a lot of noise in the room to that was being recorded. And that was part of our sound, noise. That live energy. We always wanted that in our recordings, and I think we always captured it. We did it all in our studio. The first album we recorded, we didn’t own a house yet, we were just renting. We recorded it before the Pearl was all done up and we recorded above a garage with a guy, Sam Humans. He’s a really good musician and it had no heat and it was February, freezing cold and we were just in there trying to play our instruments. Our fingers were freezing and we recorded it live in this just huge warehouse space. It sounded great. But it was pretty low-fi. Pretty low-fi budget and in terms of what we had access to but Sam is an amazing musician and great producer and he is amazing at what he does and we trusted him, too. But then the other albums and the unreleased material that we have, we recorded at our house.

Have you ever thought about releasing that?

Oh yeah, it’s a long-term goal. It’s hard when the other two creative forces involved are so far away. I think probably at this point some of them would be willing to relinquish control over it, since we are here and have the files, just let us kind of finish them. But yeah, that’s definitely a goal. I hope to do that in the next couple years actually, because there is some good material there.

What is your favorite song that you have ever written?

Favorite song to play would be- well with Chores it would probably be “Wine Buzz.” It was a really fun, dancy song. It was super hard to play and sing but it was such a challenge that I always really enjoyed playing it. The other song I always really liked playing was “New New Deal” because I wasn’t singing lead for the whole song and I did have guitar solos. It was often a situation of doing both and while I could do it and enjoy doing it, it still was more high pressure when you’re playing guitar solos and singing lead.

Where can people find your music? Is it on YouTube?

Apparently, Google just got rights to it. I just found out because my friend works for Google and he was like: “Hey, we can retire soon,” but he was joking because our band was nothing. We were nobodies but we had a lot of fun doing what we did and we took it seriously. Not that we took ourselves so seriously that we actually were diluted enough to believe that this is going to be our lives or we will be able to retire on this; our lively hoods. But we were serious about the music and passionate about it and we all cared about it to the same level and showed up to practice 2-3 times a week and were committed to playing shows and making recordings that we could be proud of. So yeah, Google has the rights of it. It’s on iTunes, or it was available. I’m assuming its still available on iTunes. The older stuff from Baltimore and Indiana, that’s just stuff that you would have to talk to me to get because it was before the advent of all the digitizing of music.

You have been in a few bands that have played different types of music. What type did Landing Mechanics play along with your other bands?

Landing Mechanics played more soft rock. There was one guy who was more into creating atmospheric type of songs. So that wasn’t so much like pop music but it kind of depended on whose influence was heavier in the song writing and I feel like when Landing Mechanics ended we were moving into a more interesting territory. It was Mogwai-ish a little bit but that was when we were just ending. So from the time that we came together, the album that we recorded was the most pop sounding music that I had ever been apart of. Because most of the music that I had been a part of doesn’t sound like popular music in anyway shape or form. Post punk and rock ’n’ roll. There is a band called X. That’s probably the closest comparison I could make and that’s mainly because Lou and I were both fronting the band and singing the songs, a lot of them together and I feel like that’s why we often sound like X. We all really loved Yo la Tengo and were influenced by them but I don’t feel like our own music sounds as much like Yo la Tengo. Their influence is probably more hidden in our music. So a lot of different bands that we might sound like but X would be close I think. And then lyrically there are songs like the Talking Heads in terms of lyrical style and songs that are more like Bruce Springsteen. If Lou had more influence upon the lyrics then it would sound more like Bruce Springsteen and if I did, it would sound more like David Byrne from Talking Heads.

What was your favorite memory from your entire music career thus far?

Touring. Because we had our own van. This little ford Econoline van from the ’70s. And we would just drive, the four of us, driving up and down the coast we would start in Portland and just play a show along the way. Eugene and we played a show in Ashland and we’d go down to Sacramento and all along the way stopping and seeing friends that we knew in different places and they would come to the shows. But doing that all the way down to San Diego and then coming back up and stopping in different places and, you know, meeting people along the way. Crashing on people’s floors. I even did a tour while I was teaching here at Northwest Academy. We recorded a video for a song called “Super Car” in the Blue Box Theatre which you can see on Vimeo. Our friend Jeremy Bird recorded it and it was just kind of a fun project. So yeah, those tours were just so much fun. Meeting people and really just feeling like you were free and you were pursuing your art, your interest and being creative and making people smile and selling albums. Having terrible shows but then recovering from it the next night. We all had day jobs so when we took tours, it would have to be a week or two at most because that’s as much time as you would have off work and then you had to be back at work. So I think the four of us, because we had day jobs, the experience of touring was a little bit different too because you were really happy to have the opportunity to just do what you really want to do. Pursue your art.