As a teenager in the late 90s and early 2000s, Jack grew up with the birth of the internet, as well as one of the first popular music sharing services, Napster. While many kids his age were using it to download popular music, Jack took a different approach. “I just started following things backwards, just kind of how I think it went…Rancid was one of my favorite bands when I was really young, and I started kind of just tracing their influences. That was just like a natural thing for me to do because I was curious of how they got to where they were. And I just kind of kept going back in time and back in time and wound up at the country blues and Woody Guthrie and all this folk music that was super fascinating to me, and I kind of just stuck around there for a while.
Being a child of the 90s when it’s just like N’Sync and the Backstreet Boys in all these neat little packages, it’s really nice to hear someone really raw like Woody Guthrie who’s just singing a song about how the Dust Bowl has affected his life. There’s something super honest about that that’s really real that rang a bell.”
Woody Guthrie’s influences are clear in Jack’s earlier albums, through his storytelling lyrics, solo fingerpicking guitar style, and simple, raw sound. But for his latest album, Ain’t It The Same, Jack decided to take a new approach. “That first solo record is recorded was in my friend’s basement, just basically live. The second record I did, The Shadows in the Sunset is just recorded in an old church live as well. We had two days on this track to record everything straight without any overdubs. [For Ain’t It The Same] I just I kind of planned out a year of my life and decided it was something I wanted to do and put together the best band I could think of and found the best studio I could think of. I really just wanted to get into the studio environment and see what happens. I had a lot of fun with it.”
A big difference on Ain’t It the Same is the addition of the band, something Jack was very excited about, and rightly so. Ain’t It The Same features a huge amount of talent: John James Tourville (fiddler for The Deslondes) on guitar, Casey McDonough on bass, and Alex Hall on drums, as well as studio engineer for the album.
“Basically, all these all these guys had a huge hand in it. I know my bio claims production status, but in a sense, it is a very anarchistic, kind of production in that I wrote the songs, I put the band together, I booked the studio time, arranged travel for everybody and then we had two weeks in the studio. And they had never really even heard these songs before. We just kind of worked them out together and kind of just worked to find what felt good and what felt right and what felt fun. That’s what came out of it and it was such a fun process of collaboration”
But Jack has made sure to stay true to his roots, even with more people and more polish. “The post-production phase was a little bit more involved to where [Alex Hall and I] did spend a lot of time and just got to play around in the studio like little kids, adding a little effects here and there.. But yeah I did kind of keep true to the live aspect that the old CDs had, just with a bit of trickery.”
As Jack’s career continues to grow and change, his thoughts on music stay the same, echoing himself as a teenager downloading blues jug music in a world of boy bands and bubblegum pop: “It’s kind of like that Louis Armstrong quote, ‘There’s only two kinds of music, good music and bad music.’ I think any music has to have soul. Something behind it, something real to make it move somebody. I think that’s the way it’s supposed to be.’
Jack Klatt – Interview + Photos courtesy of Elizabeth Rajchart | Instagram
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