Jill’s interview lasted exactly 51 minutes. “Longest interview yet,” I thought to myself. It honestly didn’t even feel that long. Every second of our conversation was a moment that held some kind of merit, some kind of valuable lesson in it, and, among the many things that she and I agreed upon, the one that stuck out to me the most was this idea of community, and how music really is just a conversation that’s being had between you and the people around you. I’m getting too ahead of myself, though. We had worked our way up to that point in the conversation, and the things that were said beforehand can all still serve as valuable segues into what ended up being the crux of our interview together.
It’s funny. I met Jill back in the summer. I had gone out one night with a couple of friends to the home of a friend of a friend, and they were having a get-together out on the roof of their apartment building. I had gotten completely and utterly drunk that night, but one of the few things I remembered was that I had met three girls up on that roof, and that one of them had said that she was in a band. That girl was Jill. Jill Olesen. I reached out to her afterwards and, over the course of the next couple of months, she and I got to know each other a little better. Our bands played together, I came out to see her band perform, she came out to see my band perform, and we became pretty good friends. So, once the idea for this project came about, she was one of the first people I thought about interviewing. I asked, she agreed, and we set up a date for it. The day came, I set my phone down on the kitchen table, and the two of us got to talking.
Naturally, I learned a lot about Jill in our interview. She was from the small town of Greenwich, Connecticut and grew up in Cos Cob, a relatively quiet neighborhood therein. Like with every musician that I interview, I asked Jill general questions about what her life was like growing up. Did her parents encourage her to play music? Was there a lot of music being played in the house? Things like that. Whenever I prepare for these interviews, I want the question of “what was it that made you want to be a musician?” to be answered without it being asked. It never works to ask that question head-on, but by just having a simple conversation with someone, you can learn what the answer is organically.
So, through our conversation, I learned that she did, in fact, grow up with musically-supportive parents who were formative in shaping their daughter’s tastes. Whether it was her dad playing some Kanye West or her mom putting on some of her alt-country faves, Jill took it all in and fell in love with the idea of one day playing music herself. And, evidently, she didn’t let that dream just be a dream. By the time she moved to New York, fresh out of high school and ready for whatever came her way, Jill was already a classically-trained saxophonist, a pianist, a bassist, and had been in her fair share of musical projects back home in Connecticut. However, what she hadn’t yet had was a creative outlet for her own material. She hadn't yet found a way to express herself in the way she wanted to. But, all that would change once she started university.
At NYU, Jill met Ethan Williams and, in Ethan, Jill found a creative partner through which she was finally able to work on a couple of songs with that she had written back home in Connecticut. And, as luck would have it, Ethan was from Connecticut, too. So, in between semesters and holiday breaks in the school year, they recorded material that would form the basis of what would later become Punchlove, the band they started together. The first couple of songs they recorded were songs that were written by either Jill or Ethan, but none of them were songs that were written by the both of them. This, Jill admitted, was due in large part to the reluctance she displayed when it came to letting her songs be creatively shaped by anyone other than herself. Having previously been in a band where everyone was an equal participant in the creative process, Ethan was initially taken aback by her refusal to let him contribute, but, ultimately, he let her do things the way she wanted to do them and, for a while, the band’s music was written in this way, with Jill and Ethan writing their songs separately and coming together to record them once they were finished.
However, as time went on and more and more members were recruited into the band, it became difficult to maintain this method of writing; the band began to house more creative minds and, naturally, everyone wanted to become more involved in the creative process. Eventually, Jill realized that if the band was going to function as a unit, she would need to relinquish control of the songs she brought to the table, and let everyone contribute to her ideas. The relinquishing of that control wasn't something that happened easily, however, and the question of why it wasn’t easy for her was something that led to our conversation taking a bit more of an introspective tone, and to what I consider to be the most important part of the interview.
Here, Jill and I began to really dig deep into why the need to control the creative process comes about, what it means to let go of that control, and what the act of letting go ultimately does in the grander scheme of things.
Anything that anyone ever creates is something that they immediately consider personal. Personal to themselves, their thoughts, their ideas, and their tastes. It’s something you want to protect; to shield from the world and keep from any outside influences that may turn your work into something you no longer identify with. In that sense, music truly can be an egotistical thing, but, not in the traditional sense, not in the connotatively negative sense that we've come to attach to the word. No, I mean to say that music is, quite literally, a product of one’s ego. In an even more literal sense, everything is, of course, a product of one’s ego, but music, and creativity as a whole, is a form of expressing that ego in a particularly vulnerable way.
Through the process of expressing yourself through music, you're opening yourself up in such an intensely personal way. It's you telling the world that these are the things you like in a song. It's you saying, “I thought these chords were good enough to sing a melody over, and I thought these lyrics were good enough to sing over that melody with.” It's all such an open display of your own thoughts and ideas that, when it comes to the idea of letting someone else in on that process, anyone would become defensive. Me, Jill, and anyone else who’s ever had to open themselves up in that way had initially been reluctant to do so due to the simple fact that letting your creativity be shaped by anyone other than yourself really is such a vulnerable thing to be put through. But, in a band, things just do not and cannot work that way. In a band that truly works together, you have to be willing to let yourself be vulnerable. Otherwise, there's just no point in being in one. In a lot of ways, it really is like being in a relationship; you have to be willing to trust your bandmates, and to have faith in their abilities as musicians. If you don't, the band will fall apart, and you will have lost something special as a result. Jill and I both understood that, and we had both been through the experience of casting aside our egos for the sake of our bands. However, what the trade-off ended up being was so much more rewarding because, as a result of opening ourselves up, what we have also both experienced is the beauty of collaboration.
The idea of collaboration is an inherently liberating one. It's one that involves the release, the surrendering of one's ego. You have to be willing to let an idea, borne out of the comfort of your own head, your own private dominion, be subjected to another person's thoughts, tastes and ideas, all in the hopes that they don’t take something that was once so personal to you and turn it into something that you can no longer identify with. But, again, you have to be willing to take that risk. You have to trust your collaborators, let them pour their own hearts and souls into your work and let it stand as something that came about as a result of something other than yourself. Once you do, you'll feel a sense of fulfillment unlike any other; one that brings you closer to the people you created that music with, and one that brings with it a deeper sense of connection. And, at the end of the day, that's what music is really all about: connection.
In much the same way that collaboration involves allowing yourself to connect with another person, releasing the product of that creativity out into the world involves allowing you and your work to emotionally connect with those who understand how much your art means to you. In turn, the depth of that shared understanding provides the catalyst for people to then attach their own meaning onto your work, and form some semblance of ownership over it as well—that's what being a fan is. If anything, collaboration is really just a way of letting that connection take place sooner rather than later; a way of letting it happen during the creative process rather than after it.
In the end, though, the results are all the same. By creating music with people you trust and putting it out there, you allow it to take on a form in which it can be exchanged with other people, and, in a very communal sense, gifted onto other people. It's a way of sharing a piece of yourself with others in such a deeply personal way that only art is able to do. But, again, it was only after opening ourselves up to that experience that Jill and I were able to understand that. It was only after letting go of our need to control that we were able to see the fruit that that that experience provides.
At the end of our interview, Jill said something that I think sums up our conversation pretty well. For my final question, I asked her:
"What does music mean to you?”
She responded with:
“Community. [Nowadays], being a musician takes on a whole new definition for me, and it has so much more to do with community and inspiration. [Being a musician is] being able to see what the other people in this community are doing, being inspired by it and having this conduit to then communicate back. [It’s being able to say] ‘I’m inspired by this, now what am I going to say back?’ It’s like being able to contribute to a conversation in your community. On so many different levels, too, though. On the level of when you’re playing with other bands, and on the sub-level of being in a band. It’s saying, ‘You're gonna do this with your instrument, I’m gonna do this with mine, and we’re going to communicate with each other.’”
To me, this was the single most important thing said throughout the entire interview. Through her response, Jill qualified the entire idea of connection that this conversation had been about, and proved that having people connect to your music, whether they’re a part of the creative process or not, truly is one of the most fulfilling things that can come out of being a musician. The process of internalizing the work of the people you admire, and being filled with enough inspiration to then create something in return, is one of the most beautiful things about art itself. There's just such an innate beauty in being so taken by something that it inspires you to express yourself in the same way that your favorite artists have. It’s the act of showing, in no uncertain terms, that there does indeed exist a way in which one can share a piece of themselves with the world in such a powerfully moving manner, and that you can do it, too, if you just give yourself the chance to.