Welcome to BuzzMuisc JONES! We were certainly motivated by your recent hip hop single “Fired Up.” Can you elaborate on the message behind this song? “Fired Up,” invokes a desire and passion to succeed in music, and specifically hip hop. This song is my way of saying, “Hey I’ve been grinding for a long time, this is my passion, and I feel like I deserve my place in hip hop”. I want my bars to be able to stand up with the best of them. This song is about taking all the times I’ve been looked over, ignored, or not taken seriously, and using that as motivation to keep writing, keep picking up the mic, and getting better at what I do. I think feelings of rejection or being told “you’re not good enough” is something we all can relate to, no matter what passion in life we might be pursuing. In all honesty, being told no, or that I can’t do something is the best motivation for me to work harder and succeed. That’s what fires me up (pun intended.. that was corny and I don’t care haha…) You told us that you had to overcome many adversities growing up. Can you elaborate on how these affected you as a person, and as an artist? Growing up I had a really difficult time with anxiety, depression, feelings of insecurity, and self-worth. I dealt with bullying for a lot of my childhood as well. My step-dad was somebody who came into my life during my teen years that really started to teach me lessons in life that I’d never been taught before. He helped me to start feeling confident and even encouraged me to pursue music. However, I was at home with him when he passed away from a massive heart attack the day before my high school graduation. This was an event in life that, honestly, really broke me and caused me to really shut down and close myself off. This leads me down a road towards a struggle with alcohol that lasted for many years. This is one of the reasons I wrote a song called “Family Drama”.I decided to take different struggles like Guilt, Depression, Anxiety, Anger, and Regret and personify them as if they were members of my family. The truth is these things kind of are because they stay with us for so long in our lives. So I thought “what if we had a family counseling session? What would I say to them?” So the first half of the song is me talking to these issues about how I’ve dealt with them over the years. The entire second half of the song is devoted to Addiction. I think a lot of times in life we just cope with our struggles and feelings in the wrong way. The most powerful line in the song for me is when Addiction says, “I never promised to make your life better I just told you I’d make everyone go away”. Sure, drugs or alcohol or whatever your vice is, might make you stop feeling guilty, depressed, anxious, or sad for a while, but oftentimes the end result of addiction is isolation from everyone in our lives because it has such power over us. I want my message with this song, and really with this album, to tell anyone in a dark place in their lives that it can and will get better. I want to be a living breathing example of somebody who truly hit rock bottom, but was able to pick myself back up and come out okay on the other side. My biggest mistake was not talking about the turmoil going on inside of me and asking for help. I thought that was weak. I thought I’d be judged. I thought people would turn their backs on me. The day I finally admitted to myself that I needed to change was the start of a whole new life for me. My biggest mistake was not talking about the turmoil going on inside of me and asking for help. I thought that was weak. I thought I’d be judged. I thought people would turn their backs on me. The day I finally admitted to myself that I needed to change was the start of a whole new life for me. When I say all of this, and when I rap about it in my music, it’s not for sympathy. It’s to make a connection with everyone who is feeling the same way or has been through the same circumstances, and as a result, give them hope that things will get better. You originally created music under the name Brad Jones, where you had 80,000 streams on Spotify, and have recently switched to JONES. Why did you choose to make this change and what does it mean to you, and your style as a hip hop artist? I changed my artist name to JONES for a few reasons. The first is that I thought changing it to JONES would help me to reach a wider audience. Turns out there are a lot of white dudes named Brad Jones making music. The second reason is that I felt like I was growing as an artist and discovering new truths about myself that I had not confronted yet. I spent years struggling with my own personal demons. Now that I have been able to conquer many of those I started to ask myself, “who am I now? How have those personal battles changed me as a man?” I felt like it was time to rediscover myself and who I want to be as an artist. So I changed the name, not just as a rebrand on myself as an artist, but as sort of a rebrand on who I am and who I want to be. So far it’s really paying off. On Spotify the music has crossed 150,000 streams and is on the way to 200k. I can’t express how thankful I am to every single person who listens to my music, interacts with me on social media, shares my songs with their friends and family, and talks to me at shows. My fans make this all worth it. Without them, none of this would be possible. I am forever grateful for them. You hold a great responsibility being a voice for those suffering from anxiety, depression, addiction, and insecurity. What are your main goals as an artist regarding these very real issues that many people experience? I want my music to reach a wider audience of all ages and backgrounds. I want kids to be able to listen to my music. I want families to be able to play my songs in the car and not have to worry about censoring it. I wanted to be an example that you don’t have to cuss in hip hop to make good music or to talk about heavy subject matter. In my lyrics I rap about poverty, depression, anxiety, self-esteem, and addiction. I’ve found in my own experience that these issues started at a young age for me and as I got older I tried to cope with them in unhealthy ways. I feel like making what people might consider to be “clean” records makes my music more accessible to anyone who is struggling and needs to hear that they aren’t alone in feeling this way. I want them to hear my story and how I have been able (through a ton of mistakes) to overcome these challenges in life through the support of my closest friends and family, my faith, and to let them know that they can too. That’s the message I want anybody who hears my music to take away. We all have a story. We all struggle. But we can choose to be a victim of our circumstances, or we can choose to go after our dreams and make something of ourselves if we are willing to work for it. I’ll be the first one to tell you I’m not perfect by any means, but I hope I can give some hope to those who need it. That’s why I wrote a song called “The Ones”. I call my fanbase The OnesArmy because I make music for the ones like me. By that, I mean anyone who is struggling to get by day to day and feels like they are in a dark place with no way out. You can make it I promise…I still struggle, I won’t lie, but I feel like my purpose is to use music to unite all of us who feel this way and give us a sense of family. We can lean on each other. We can do this together.
You can listen to "Fired Up" here.
