Today we’d like to introduce you to Coolhand Jax. Him and his team share his story with us below:
Coolhand Jax is the moniker of Jake Weissman, a multi-instrumentalist songwriter and recording artist. He began the project in 2020 and tends to conceptualize it as psychedelic pop music. In the last year and a half he has created buzz by releasing two EP’s with Spirit Goth Records and directing or co-directing six music videos for the project. According to the artist, Coolhand started as more of a character but has slowly begun to meld with Weissman throughout his many sonic twists and turns. The 24 year old has been recording music for eight years now, and feels that this specific project has been the most fulfilling and true to form for himself.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I was drawn to music at a very early age, sort of mystified by instruments and recorded music. Growing up, there was no one in my family who played anything, but my parents were always listening to different things; I can remember dancing around to “Surfin’ USA” as a little kid, listening to my mom sing Tracy Chapman’s self-titled in the car on the way back from school, listening to the classic rock station on the radio. I’m only 24 but it still feels like that time is worlds away.
As an eight years old, my grandmother bought me my first guitar, which I became quite frustrated and bored with almost immediately. After a lesson or two, I ditched it – I was more interested in becoming a Red Sox player or something. Anyways, the first time I actually saw anybody really play the guitar in-person I was ten years old; it was my Mom’s boyfriends’s son, a kid a few years older than me, and he played the “Smoke on the Water” riff on my guitar that had been sitting there. It was totally magical to me.
From there, I was hooked – I’d get home from school, practice for five or six hours with some internet guitar tabs, and go to sleep. Everything else sort of fell by the wayside. My parents had just gotten divorced so I was pretty emotional about that, and a lot of other things were rapidly changing in my life- I was moving a bunch, meeting tons of new kids, trying new things. Music was the constant for me, and I started to write songs almost immediately.
I dealt with some pretty heavy mental health stuff as a teenager, and music was always a means to stay connected to myself. I was constantly discovering stuff, old and new, and constantly writing. My near-deaf grandmother lived next door to me, so I set up a studio upstairs in her home and would multi-track late into the night. It was a golden-era of DIY, one-person psych rock recording projects: Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Mac, Sean Nicholas Savage, Tame, HOMESHAKE. I took inspiration from them and a lot of others- I even skipped my prom to see UMO on their first US date of the Multi-Love tour in Boston. It was all trial and error, and most of it was quite bad, but I was much more in-love with music than I was with life at that time.
I played in a band during high school, and while we played a few shows towards the end, there wasn’t really much of a community around music where I grew up. The arts were severely underfunded- my high school had one music teacher, and he rarely showed up. It was kind of a rough environment socio-economically, it was easy to get caught up in the wrong things. To be able to make anything was enough. For all of these reasons, my experience and relationship with music was very insular and self-contained; I didn’t talk to many people about my music, and I rarely showed anybody the vast majority of it.
When I got to college, there were more kids playing music, and listening to the same music as me, than I could have ever imagined. I went to UMass Amherst, which was part of a pretty dynamic scene in the Pioneer Valley with a lot of history: The Pixies, Dinosaur Jr., And the Kids, Speedy Ortiz, and so on. There were a lot of great, slightly older bands playing around when I began as a first-year in 2015 as well- Petting Zoo, Calico Blue, Humble Digs, Spirit Ghost, Ballads of Softcore Porn. I got a group together to play some of my songs, called Sunshine Brothers Inc., and within a couple of years things started happening for us- we started selling out real venues, started touring around the North East a bit, had a few songs catch on the internet, and eventually we were featured as a Ones to Watch artist. We were all great friends, most of us living together in a big house out in North Amherst, and it was really just a magical time.
I decided to finish school a semester early to save some money; Sunshine Brothers Inc. released our follow up EP, played a last sold-out show in Northampton, and the next morning I left on three months road-trip across the US. I had a 2004 Camry that was pushing 250k miles, and the mechanic told me it probably wouldn’t make it across. In truth, I was maybe feeling aimless enough that wherever it broke down would have been alright with me. I brought a portable interface and some guitars and tracked a bunch of demos along the way- sometimes it would be at friend’s places, other times on the side of the road somewhere. These became the template for ‘No Dreams of Anything’, the first Coolhand Jax EP that I released the next year in 2020.
During the trip, I spent a week in LA, seeing some friends that had moved out here and meeting some people. There was a lot of buzz around the psych world in LA, and a lot of artists I really respected were nearby. I was really drawn to something about the city, and a few months later I road-tripped back again and stayed.
Since then, the world has obviously taken some pretty serious twists and turns. I released two EP’s with Spirit Goth Records, got a live band together, and have been writing a ton. I’ve been able to return to that sort of insular creative world, which has been nice. I’m working on my first full-length project right now, and I’m super excited about the way it’s all sounding. I’m more in love with music today than I have been in quite some time, and I’m grateful for that.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
I’ve done a lot of work to get to where I am now- artistically, emotionally, spiritually, whatever. I am beyond grateful for all of the things I have by way of materials, friendships, and abilities. As a teenager, I dealt with some pretty crippling anxiety. I went to school a city over from where I grew up, so I had a habit of staying at friends’ houses for days and getting into a lot of stupid stuff. I struggled to go to school or work, to deal with a lot of social arrangements, to leave the house. I went to some pretty dark places that I knew had fundamentally altered me. My music, and the music of others, has remained the most spiritual thing for me throughout.
I didn’t always have a lot growing up; my mom was a bit housing insecure at moments and we got by on food stamps for some years, but I rarely ever went hungry, and I managed to steer clear of some of the violent aspects of the world around me. All of this made me fairly class-conscious early on. I was taught some of the virtues of independence from a pretty early age and I’m quite grateful for that. An uncle of mine owned a Jewish Bakery & Deli while I was growing up, and I was lucky to be able to begin working for him as a 12 years old, saving up for guitars, pedals, drums, recording equipment. Both of my parents were very supportive of whatever I wanted to do with my own money, which was great.
I never had any formal training in music or production, which gave me lots of room to make mistakes and develop some kind of character in my art. I’ve picked up a few things along the way but I’m appreciative of the approach I’ve taken overall. At the end of the day, there were many times in my life where I couldn’t have even dreamed of the opportunities to make music that I am surrounded by now, able to freely record my music in my backyard and play whatever with my friends.
Is there anyone you’d like to thank or give credit to?
I have more artists than I can possibly name to list here, so I’ll leave them be and just say that I owe a lot to the inspiration of many musicians- friends and otherwise. I’m grateful for my mother’s mother, Lois, who has been gone for some time now, but who bought me my first guitar as an eight years old and gave me my first real creative outlet. I’m grateful for my family more generally, who has always been supportive of me doing what I want. I’m also super grateful to have had the pleasure of playing alongside so many great people in different groups, my Sunshine Brothers Inc. bandmates, my current bandmates, and to have found myself in communities of artists that have been down to put on shows, share their talents, and so on.
Pricing:
- $10 Cassette
- $4 No Dreams of Anything Digital EP
- $5 Superstar Baby Digital EP
Contact Info:
- Email: [email protected]
- Website: https://coolhandjax.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coolhandjax/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/coolhandjax/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/coolhandjax
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-9Iykde53U&list=PLlyHLNQIKgBJoqQHhfSVCAEJq1Wffrw48&ab_channel=SpiritGoth
- Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3mBQ1OduOz1oBNlwzGucll?si=3LgDzNSLQPOWNsWtd9MCdA
Image Credits
Johnny Gerard Grace Gulik James Wyatt
