By: Rick Landers
J.R. Potter – Photo credit: Alyona Vogelmann
Today, by design musicians must be multitaskers, taking on all the time-consuming disciplines of music that include learning and studying one’s instruments, caring for them, and broadening playing skill beyond a single musical genre.
Many, like award-winning author, J.R. Potter, take on more artistic hobbies or career ambitions, as it’s their nature to create art, sometimes seemingly from whole cloth. Jamie and his life and musical duet partner in the Crooked Angels, Amy, are well-known in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, DC area for their well-crafted songs and other well-chosen music of others that prompt audience’s to hum along and smile.
One delightful project Jamie created was to combine his love of music, with his and Amy’s love of animals, where he wrote a group of songs called, Love-Manifesto, that offered songs for free, while seeking donations to support a animal protection group.
Potter’s creative muse finds its way from songwriting and performing music, writing children’s books, and sitting down with pen and ink and developing characters that are clever, unique and quite magnetic, some creepy, yet endearing. His first book in a series, Thomas Creeper and the Gloomsbury Secret (2021) received high praise and Jamie highlighted as a “powerhouse” writer. His recent release, Thomas Creeper and the Purple Corpse (2023), the second in his series of middle-grade children’s books that he’s written and illustrated is another showstopper.
As a graphic artist, J.R. has had his work published by Image Comics. His third novel written for teens, Ragtag: City of Ash and Fire, that he calls “a cyberpunk tale” will hit the market in September 2023. He also writes and illustrates fictioj for educational publishers, Pioneer Valley Books and Heinemann Publishing.
The music of Crooked Angels were released as, Bread and Bourbon, and their recent album, Indian Summer, is out now!
J.R. Potter has been able to develop a winning entrepreneurial career and independent life style through his creative talents, strategic business acumen and hard work. And, Guitar International is pleased to get a peak into how this renaissance man has managed to succeed in building diverse revenue streams in music, graphic arts and literature, all while intriguing young readers, entertaining music fans and making life easier and safer for our animal friends.
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Rick Landers: I find many musicians to be multi-talented, playing several musical instruments, taking on not only music roles, but the business aspects too. And, you have other particularly disciplined projects in process. With respect to your music did you have overcome mental blocks to shift from the creative side to the business sides of your aspirations?
J.R. Potter: First, thank you so much for the opportunity to speak with you and Guitar International Magazine today, Rick. I describe myself as the kid who fell in love with art, writing, and music at a young age, and for better or worse, have tried to pursue all those avenues.
Sometimes I get a mental block on one project. A wall goes up. The road runs out. It’s great to have something else that feels vibrant and exciting on the backburner to work on while you wait for your spirit antenna to pick the channel back up.
I think of creatives as people with short wave radio connections to a cosmic, unexplainable source. Sometimes there’s too much static. But when that clears, it’s a beautiful thing.
As far as the business end goes, I’ve learned over the past ten or so years in both the publishing and music industries that creativity is only one part of the recipe. We live and work today in a vast digital sea. Indie creators are islands. On the indie level, you often get more control, and I think of control in terms of making what you want while embracing all the wonderful choose-your-own-adventure shifts that happen through good editorial feedback.
It’s daunting, sometimes downright demoralizing. But you press on because your voice, your spirit, will never be repeated again in the cosmos. No one has the definitive answer. Everyone has something special and worthy to say.
Rick: Have you developed some kind of strategic plan or do you mostly intuitively wing it?
J.R. Potter: There’s a line from Cool Hand Luke when Paul Newman’s character says he’s never planned anything in his life. I’ve stumbled into a lot of grace and great people along the way. I feel like I put the time in with my work and that allows me to be open and honest about what I care about.
To me, that’s the best “networking” in the cosmos. You can’t predict ripple effects, or as another new friend put it to me recently, “never underestimate the unintended consequences of doing good things.” I think art, writing, and literature are good things when they connect ourselves back to ourselves.
This is all extremely vague and pretentious. But I suppose that’s part of my “brand” too. I would say that if you get a shot at your fifteen minutes of fame, or fifteen seconds these days because our attention span in the digital ether is atrocious, be ready to share something that means something. I’m a big old school hip-hop fan. There’s a track by the great West Coast group The Pharcyde called “Somethin’ that Means Somethin’.” And the hook is basically “Gotta kick somethin’ that means somethin’.” Isn’t that the truth, Rick?
Rick: I’d say so, of course! Tell us about the road you’ve taken from first learning an instrument, to performing, recording and getting your “name” out there, or your music?
J.R. Potter: I studied classical piano for fifteen years. I was lucky to spend one magical summer at the Aspen Music School as a student, though my education was mainly in attending the incredible lineup of performances from world-class musicians and conductors like Isaac Stern and Michael Tilson Thomas. Though I can play Rachmaninoff and Beethoven still today, I never really had the chops to pursue classical piano in a serious way. However, it’s informed my music theory and love of the great sonic palette that classical music and jazz brings.
I’m self-taught on guitar, and my education on that instrument began in my teens trying to learn the explosive power chord ballads of the Smashing Pumpkins and later the quirky, acoustic shapes of Dave Matthews. It’s all a composite.
That’s what is so great about learning music. Even if you don’t love the early influences that brought you to your instrument, they still inform your training. It’s a never-ending pursuit. You never get “there.” Your instrument is an avatar for your spirit. The more you work at trying to kill the delay, the latency between what you want to express and what you are capable of expressing with two human hands and a voice, I think that’s success and true creativity.
Rick: When you and your duet partner, Amy, started to work together, were there musical interests or preferences, that needed to be ironed out, so your performances worked when pleasing audiences and building a fan base, or following?
J.R. Potter: In addition to being a beautiful singer, Amy is an amazing poet. She brings a nuance to things where I’m often “first thought, best thought.” We bonded early on over our influences coming out of the alternative country push of the late 90s: Whiskeytown, Gillian Welch, and the influences of those artists—Gram Parsons, The Byrds, Exile on Main Street-era Rolling Stones. My dream is to have Amy singing 90% of the material in our band The Crooked Angels and me singing 10%. I’ve written songs exclusively for her like “Sweet Thang” on our sophomore release “Indian Summer.” I’m hoping we get to that 90/10 mark someday.
J.R. Potter: As part of Valentine’s Day this year, I released my first solo record “Love Manifesto” which is sort of like my Basement Tapes of the past ten years. I have a small, DIY studio. Nothing flashy. But then again, I’m reminded that all those Carter Family songs recorded in Bristol or Robert Johnson’s haunting record were pretty damn low-fi and they changed the world.
“Love Manifesto” is raw but real. I play all the instruments except for my friend Nick Sjostrom adding bass on “Hearts Like Ours.” Nick is a wonder and a truly great human. He produced both of the Crooked Angels’ records (“Bread and Bourbon” and “Indian Summer”). He kindly mastered my DIY recordings. I don’t care about making a fraction a cent on streaming.
With “Love Manifesto,” I used it as a promo boost for the pet rescue organization we’ve fostered for and adopted through (Pet Connect DC). I sold several concerts for large donations to the organization, as well as $100 donations for original songs.
Some of these songs are still being written, and it’s been a great way to connect with people and collaborate with them. For example, I wrote a song for a friend of friends’ anniversary and I think it hit its mark. That’s the good stuff. When you can pull something out of thin air and it lands in a real, compelling way.
Rick: Monetizing a music career, oftentimes means maintaining a regular job to pay the bills. Have you developed a multi-revenue stream strategy to run on all cylinders?
J.R. Potter: I work 3-4 jobs. I write and illustrate children’s fiction for educational publisher Pioneer Valley Books during the week, bartend at night, play music on the weekends, all the while promoting my novels like the second Thomas Creeper mystery that just came out on June 15th.
There’s a lot of upfront costs to all of this, but the hope is that the bills get paid, and over time, you start to build your fanbase enough to tour and hopefully expand into other franchise opportunities for your work (TV, film, animation). Another added bonus is that you are always moving through other circles. There are always surprising intersections. It’s never stagnate.
I know I should be more focused on the financials. With books, I’ve really hitched myself to the idea of boosting literacy and wonder, specifically working with schools and libraries. The “shelf life” (sorry for the pun!) is greater with those pursuits. You could change the trajectory of someone’s life. I know my life was changed the day my dad brought home a copy of one of the late-great author John Bellairs’s mysteries from our local library in Connecticut. Bellairs’s illustration collaborator, the great Edward Gorey, would also set the bar for me for illustration for many years to come.
Rick: What instruments are you typically playing on stage and do you have favorites?
J.R. Potter: I play a Martin CEO acoustic that looks like a John Lennon J-45. It’s not a rough and road-weary as Willie Nelson’s “Trigger,” but it’s getting there! I think our tools should reflect our work.
It’s like the famous line: “Never trusty a skinny chef.” Don’t trust a guitarist who doesn’t have some nicks and dirt on their rig.
I also play a Korg SV-1 keyboard with some preferences programmed (Hammond B3, clavinet, and obviously a good concert grand). I’m the lucky owner of a new small-shoulder Gibson that will be great to have on stage in open tuning.
I also have an Ibanez jazz semi-hollow body that rocks my world and a Gretsch steel resonator that I record with at home. But I’m not a tone king. I’m still a DIY, Tom Waits kind of dude. Junkyard digger. Rag and bones man. There’s a line Guy Clark’s majestic song “The Guitar.” He sings about a prophetic moment pulling a guitar out of a case. “Tune it up / play a song / Let’s see what haunts it.”
Rick: Before you head out for a performance and at the end of one, do you have a checklist or a process to minimize problems or forgotten gear, as well as follow-up thanks to venues?
J.R. Potter: I’m the king of forgetting one thing each gig. Thankfully, it’s a usually small thing like an adapter so we can play music through an iPhone at set break if it’s a private party. A checklist? What a novel idea. You’re using logic and reason there, Rick. I have those things in short supply.
Rick: One of your other talents is writing and I understand you’ve been getting traction on that side of your life. With your second book now done, what have been the major differences in your writing or your overall approach between the two?
J.R. Potter: It’s not a sprint, that’s for sure. I used to be 90% inspiration. Something would come like an epiphany. Because of the strength of that signal, I assumed everything was pretty much there. Now I really rely on feedback and editorial. For example, one of my friends and fellow authors suggested that a certain creature that gets killed in my second novel could return as a ghost ally later. I was gob smacked. It was such a brilliant suggestion.
I often miss the things that are right in front of my nose. So I try my best to lean into that feedback now, all the while still keeping true to my spirit compass. After all, it’s your inspiration and perspiration that births something wild and wonderful into the world.
There’s a “pencils down” moment with any project. You have to stand by your decisions. That’s scary, but the alternative is analysis-paralysis and over-working. To not sound even more pretentious than I already do, I’d say that you have to stand back and let the world decide if your efforts came across. Sometimes they fall flat. That’s okay as long as you tried with your whole heart.
J.R. Potter – Photo credit: Alyona Vogelmann
Rick: How’d you come up with the Thomas Creeper character?
J.R. Potter: I love underdogs. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain. They’re really close to the ground in so many ways. I wanted to create a fictional playground in the world of Gloomsbury, MA where I could infuse all my gothic and steampunk tendencies.
Into that world I thrust a true underdog. It’s rough and beautiful being young. So I thought of a young, empathetic, smart person who is tasked with inheriting something he doesn’t want—a family funeral business. His brother has died mysteriously and there’s this horrible anxiety and silence swirling around his home life.
The novel originally began with Thomas and his mortician father leaning over a corpse and Thomas saying, “What do I do with eyes?” I still think that’s great starter hook of a line. But it was too “on the nose” as they say. So I backed out the lens. I began with a weird Jules Verne-esque submarine rising up through the depths of Gloomsbury Bay. After that, I was off to the races.
Rick: You’re also the illustrator of your books, have you always been a noodler and at what point did you become more studious in your approach that developed in your own signature style? Any influencers?
J.R. Potter: Edward Gorey was an early influence. I also grew up in the late 80s and 90s in what has been called the Second Golden Age of comics. Three artists working for Marvel—Jim Lee, Marc Silvestri, and Mark Texeira—absolutely blew my mind with the work in Ghost Rider, X-Men, and Wolverine. I think I intuitively started to understand angles and composition by watching them.
These days I’m trying to get to a cleaner line style. That’s greatly influenced by the cartoon work of my other early heroes: Bill Waterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes; Martin Handford of the Where’s Waldo series; and, of course, the great Gary Larson of The Far Side. The master between those two worlds is Jean Giraud, alias Moebius. Everything from the Alien, Dune, and Fifth Element movies are basically ripped whole-cloth from Moebius’s work. What a genius.
Rick: How do the challenges differ between writing song lyrics and writing a full length book, that obviously include the amount of time needed to capture a listener or reader?
J.R. Potter: Great question. Books are sonically limited unless you are reading them out loud; whereas with a song, it’s a much trimmer beast. Even a long Dylan psychedelic epic like “Visions of Johanna” is still less in word count than most short stories.
With the second Thomas Creeper book, I bridged the divide, adding original song lyrics inside the book. It will be so fun to be able to perform those songs alongside live readings of the book. It’s another added layer.
You still need to draw a listener or reader in, regardless of the format. Sometimes that means trimming the fat. Do we need a visual recitation of every single thing that exists in the room you are describing your character walking into? No.
My songwriting heroes like John Prine, Townes van Zandt, and Peter Case use an economy of language combined with sonics and consonants that create a magic spell.
I think a song is a magic spell, a book maybe a prolonged one. Can you do the sleight-of-hand? Can you keep a listener or reader captivated? And can you, the creator, get something out of it beyond these performances. That’s important.
Robert Frost famously said “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” I think that can be expanded to “No fun, mystery, terror, joy, etc.” If you the creator are not captivated by what going on in your work, how are you supposed to transmit that wonder to someone else? I love the research side of a novel. I get to be a student again.
Rick: So, is your Creeper book series going to continue on or are you moving on to other story ideas?
J.R. Potter: Yes! The Creeper series will go on as long as people buy the books and want to read them. The fun thing with a series is that you have an A to Z you have to get to in the storytelling, but there’s also an overarching A to Z on a series level. For example, Thomas learns in Book 1 that he’s a Fixer, a mysterious and historic designation for a detective for the dead. What that means and what threats that might pose will be unraveled over time.
I’m constantly working on other non-Creeper projects. I have a YA supernatural graphic novel series called The Glimmer Society that began with a short one-shot published by Image Comics and is back in production with a friend and collaborator in New York. I have a cyberpunk “fairy tale” loosely based on Alice in Wonderland coming out in September. And then I have three other WIPs that get me up in the morning. I want to do it all. And I’ll do my best until the road runs out.
Rick: What are your thoughts about the introduction of the AI authoring or AI writing in general, like personal love letters, (smile) and including lyrics and how should be either embraced, accepted cautiously or not at all?
J.R. Potter: I’m definitely not the source to ask about this. I will say, however, that we are playing out the “Imitation Game” envisioned by Alan Turing in the 1940s. Turing was an absolute genius. He helped crack the Enigma code, built some of the first working computers (Turing Machines). He was also crucified by the British government for his sexual orientation.
I know the ’40s and ’50s were different times, but there’s something that the word tragic doesn’t even touch when you have somebody like Turing who helps save their homeland and the government turns around and kills them because of their xenophobia. Turing’s Imitation Game pre-figures our question of “Is this human? Or is this a digital mimic?”
Although I don’t care for his politics these days, Van Morrison sings about piercing the realm of “glamour” in his song “Dweller on the Threshold.” I think it’s going to get harder and harder to decipher the mimic-work of AI and pierce the realm of glamour. Even more reason why we all need to keep making things with our hands that reflect our spirits that no device or computer will ever be able to fully recognize or replicate.
J.R. Potter: In lieu of making any real money from my creative pursuits, I’m lucky that once I have a body of work I can share that work becomes a passport to new places and new relationships. This is the good side of the “pencils down” part of creativity.
You have something to share! Not just creative speculation. I always keep my eye out for awards, opportunities, residencies, anything that could subsidize the creative process, lead to new adventures and new experiences. I was lucky to be selected as writer-in-residence for 2 weeks at Chateau Orquevaux near the Ardennes in France. Though I write and create every day, I honestly don’t know what it will be like to have two weeks of unfettered, unmonitored creativity. Absolute heaven!
Rick: What kinds of advice do you have for others who want to live the life and career of a musician, artist and/or writer?
J.R. Potter: I would say keep making “somethin’ that means somethin’” to circle back to The Pharcyde. Whether you know it or not, you hold space and inspiration for others. You are a lifelong learner. There’s really no end to what you can make with your heart and your hands.
We all start out idolizing and copying the styles of others. If we dig a bit deeper, however, we find out that they idolized and copied other people too. As my friend George says, the only original thought in the Universe is when one cell decided to split and become two. So what if it’s all been done before.
It’s never had your perspective, your voice, your force of character. If you can work at your craft in a way that you can take that love and wonder and energy and transmit it to someone else, well that’s lightning in a bottle. You never know who or what you might spark. A revolution? Let’s tune up, play something, see what haunts it.
