Spotlight: Junior Mesa Takes The Center Stage in Nashville
CURRENTLY, JUNIOR MESA AND HIS BAND HAVE A HARD CROWD TO PLEASE - This is Basement East, an inescapable battlefield for most first national tours, residing in the heart of the Music City. This is where the touring freshies will inevitably be up for comparisons with Nashville’s own vibrant music scene, in the hands of attendees who are most likely touring veterans themselves.
It doesn’t help their case that Junior Mesa is opening for a well-anticipated European headliner, Inhaler, nor that he and his band mess up the setlist during their first song.
How did they get here? Right around the barricade, among the odd stares of Inhaler fans, someone’s screaming, “I love you Junior!” Guys in their mid to late 20s pack the mid-range loudly whispering, “But the bassist is pretty good though” to their friends while their faces clearly say, “I can probably do a better job.”
In the back of the venue, all hell breaks loose. People twice the age of the five kids on stage either stand, staring, soullessly with draft beer in hand, or worse, giggling to one another in mysterious Nashville lingo.
Just when everything looks like a big “uh-oh,” something shifts, as if the guys on stage simply played a trick on the crowd for the first 10 minutes. It almost feels like someone altered the magnetic field of Basement East. Right in the center, someone starts bobbing their head, the person next to them follows, and eventually, even the draft-beer soulless souls come alive.
“If you wear a John Lennon shirt, don’t be a bad version of John Lennon,” an older man in the crowd shares, slightly condescending in a way that says “I could do better than you.” says an older man who sounds like he thinks he could have written a better article than me, “What they are trying to do is cool; I mean, I’d love to hear the record and see.”
He was trying to play it cool. I stood right behind him when he began to smile and daze off during the almost cinematic mirage of the bridge in “Listen Close.” Would be disappointed or surprised if he were to find out that Junior Mesa has yet to release a debut album?
Junior Mesa, with his Lennon shirt on, sits on the arm of the bigger couch in the not-so-sizable green room. His bandmates are testing out a 360 cam, one of the many things that would serve as fun interruptions to our interview.
“This camera could be cool for your interviews,” he notes. “You can also go up to the camera and look like a fish.”
The fish topic didn’t arise from nowhere — it was actually my attempt at an ice breaker. To start our conversation, I inquired about the fish in Mesa’s Zoom background that were present in previous interviews, and whether he has an obsession with the animal.
“I'm not obsessed with fish,” he answers with a smile, “but I was in a rap group; our band was called Yellowbelly. So I looked it up — I guess there's a fish called the yellowbelly. Then I just saved that picture. It's been the same picture for about three years, and I've been using it every now and then.”
“So you’re not attached to it,” I add, just to clarify.
“No, not at all, I hate it,” he answers.
Mesa has a sense of natural cool to him, or possibly one that is unhinged. It’s the same feeling that caused a magnetic field shift during their set. Despite their initial hiccup, Mesa and his band looked like they were having fun the entire time. Obviously the band did not plan on messing up, but they also did not have a game plan to win over the crowd by the end of the set. But win it over they did.
Mesa’s days in a rap group making beats are long behind him, but even the last EP, Cirque Du Freak, which came out August of last year, feels especially distant to him.
“I want less structure in a way,” he details of his upcoming musical direction. “I want more of a free-flowing thing [where] it doesn't have to have hooks or repeating parts. It doesn't have to be guitars and drums; it could be voice memos that I get. Actually, Sean introduced me to that years ago.” He points to his guitarist, Sean Lee, sitting on the opposite end of the couch. “You were telling me how stupid it was in music school that they would make you listen to the air conditioner.”
“It blew my mind,” Mesa continues. “Ever since then I’ve just been voice memo recording everything, listening to the birds and listening to that voice announcement at the train station … Or when you’re in an Uber and you have a conversation with somebody that’s going to die in six months — which happened to me, and I was recording it.”
While recalling this slightly bizarre encounter and noting that he almost feels like this is a bit exploitative — although the person involved did not seem to mind it — his other bandmate, bassist Julian Cullars, recalls another instance.
“You did that on the last tour when we hit that Rite Aid,” Cullars says. “And I saw you sample that toy and it just blew my mind.”
Someone else in the room jumps in and adds, “And you did that with the sign yesterday–”
“What sign yesterday?” I ask.
“It was just a fucked up sign that says ‘No Parking’ or something,” Mesa answers. He now has to raise his voice a bit, as all his bandmates are recalling different instances of Mesa’s voice memo-ing. “Another one [I did was] when I was crossing a bridge, and you could hear the vibration of it, so I put my phone under the bridge.”
“You could have dropped your phone!” I interrupt.
“I did drop it,” Mesa says, with a matter-of-fact kind of nonchalance. “I dropped it and it fell under the bridge. Then I just walked over the bridge and picked it up.” He then takes out his phone to show its cracked screen. To be fair, it’s not as bad as expected.
Currently, Junior Mesa draws a lot of inspiration swiping through mood boards on Pinterest and Instagram, but also shares that movies that focus on visual entertainment also interest him.
“Things like the warp perspective are cool,” he says. “I like to watch a lot of movies that are almost boring because they make almost no sense. They don't tell a story [but] they have this visual entertainment appeal. It’s really inspiring, even lyrically, because it's like visual poetry in a way.”
When asked what and whose movies in particular, it comes with no surprise that Mesa name-drops Alejandro Jodorowsky and the master of lack-of-structure himself, David Lynch. He has seen two episodes of Twin Peaks (his bandmates chime in to comment on the show’s bizarreness and how it’s “hard to watch at times”) and the 1977 Lynch classic, Eraserhead.
“Isn’t one of your music videos a bit ‘Eraserhead?’” I interject. “The one that’s really bizarre [where] you were in a studio?”
“The one for ‘What’s Enough?’ Yeah, it’s like that feeling of “What the fuck is going on?” Mesa confirms.
Though there may not be a direct correlation between Mesa’s newfound spontaneity and his relatively new problem with epilepsy, his medical condition undeniably affects his path and attitude.
“I think that changed my perspective on life a lot,” Mesa explains. “For a year, I was just bedridden – I couldn't even really listen to music or write. It was hard for me to even have a full conversation because it got so bad. That definitely changed my outlook on life and my perspective; what I wanted out of [life]. In a way, I was living in this wonky, absurd world that didn't make sense anymore.”
Luckily, he has since then found the right medication to keep the epilepsy problem under control, and it isn’t something to be concerned of even on a national tour.
“I realized if I’m alive, I might as well be living,” he says.
But there’s still a lot more to explore and figure out for the young musician. When asked whether he’s had his first moment of “Holy shit, I make music and this is working out for me,” he’s not too sure it’s happened yet.
“When I was 18 I was like, ‘My only life goal is to write an album,’ which I don't think I've done,” he describes. “I have EPs, but in my heart I don't consider that an album. I think once I put out an album, I'll feel like, ‘I'm a musician, [and] this is what I do; I've become what I want to be.’”
But Mesa eagerly shares some details about the upcoming album. “[They are] songs [that are] living and breathing, maybe like those movies [we mentioned],” he explains. “They're like this world that you can conceptualize but not physically grab. Like Dr. Seuss books.”
“It's gonna feel like you can hear a world inside of them,” he summarizes.
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