Preview the new album on bandcamp now ahead of the full release Friday January 27th
In 2022 Jon collected his catalog of unreleased recordings and compiled them into albums for release. Old Haunts is the capstone album of that series which includes some of his favorites recorded between 1999 and 2008. Leading with the pop rock love song “Like Nobody Else” which was written for a 2002-2003 New Year’s Eve party where it was debuted in the last ever reunion performance of the band “Only Anything”, the youthful band that initiated Jon’s borderline unhealthy rock and roll obsession. The heavy mystery of “Lonely Eyes”, the simple acoustic cassette recording of the standard “Cry Me a River”, and the solo a cappella “Strollin'” are some of the top highlights of the collection.
My Wooden Heart – Album by Jon Anything
An album featuring acoustic guitar and other instruments. Song selections are pulled from the Jon Anything recording archive from the early 2000s through 2018 and with 2 all new recordings from 2022: “Need” and “‘Deed I Do”.
Links to Streaming:
Spotify – Apple – YouTube – Amazon – Bandcamp
THE DEMOS
Three albums released in the Fall of 2022 contain the majority of Jon’s archived demos and recordings up to the year 2015. These are mostly home demos, some transferred from 4 track cassette tapes but most are early digital home studio recordings. It’s a collection covering the greater part of two decades of attempts at cracking into the music business from different angles. Some songs were pitched to publishers as songs meant for other artists, some were promotional for Jon’s attempts at getting his own band off the ground, some were responses to industry prompts and songwriting contests. These recordings are contemporaries to Old Haunts, they are essentially B-sides, rarities, and demos leading up to the album Silver Streak (2016).
Tell Me a Tale is an acoustic collection which includes 2 tracks that are much more recent than any other in these demo collections and the audio was lifted directly from video entries in NPR’s Tiny Desk contests of 2019 (Honest Mistake) and 2020 (Tell Me a Tale). Honest Mistake had a day in the sun when it was featured in the All Songs Blog as Jon, under the moniker Gill T. performed this song in the desert outside Phoenix AZ and included a few rope spinning tricks he picked up growing up in Tucson. Although chronologically these two are outliers they fit well stylistically into the category of acoustic demos. Interestingly enough this collection also has the earliest recording “1997” an acoustic guitar instrumental solo which was named after the year it was recorded – 1997.
The remaining demos on Middle Child and Twin Sister are a grab-bag of odds and ends which are full arrangements, but rough enough to easily earn the “demo” label. There were enough tracks to fill 2 full size albums so the more random ones were relegated to “middle child” status and the more standard (slightly more refined?) alt-rock versions are bundled as Twin Sister although there was not a strict formula so these are loose classifications.
JGT Music 