When I talked to AJ Jackson in 2017, Saint Motel was somewhere between indie pop darlings and arena-ready openers, riding shotgun with Panic! At the Disco in stadiums they could barely believe they were playing. “I wish we could—we don’t have that kind of fan base,” Jackson admitted, then paused. “Yet.”
They were getting there. By then, saintmotelevision had already planted its neon flag in the pop landscape—quirky, cinematic, and gleefully uncool in all the ways that eventually make a band timeless. “We kind of just did what we liked,” Jackson shrugged. “Sometimes that wasn’t what was the craze at the moment.”
Which explains a lot, really. saintmotelevision wasn’t built like a typical pop album, and Jackson doesn’t seem like someone who would’ve survived a traditional A&R gauntlet anyway. “We probably wrote around 100 songs,” he said. “Narrowed that down to 25 we actually produced out. And from those, got it down to 10.”
Among the producers: Lars Stalfors, Captain Cuts’ Ben Berger and Ryan McMahon, and Pagnotta and Frederik Thaae—each with their own flavors. Yet somehow the album held together. “A lot of that has to do with the production starting in-house,” Jackson said. “I take them a certain way, and then the producers kind of add their own insights. But the foundation was the same.”
He still didn’t hear it as a finished product. “It still feels malleable,” he said. “Like the cord hasn’t been completely cut. Maybe in five years, I’ll hear it as an album.”
It’s probably fitting that ambiguity was the name of the game. The band thrives in that strange in-between, where a song like “Elisa” can shift into old-Hollywood orchestration without apology, and “Born Again” can poke at religion without drawing blood. “It’s not really taking a stab at anybody,” Jackson explained. “It’s based on a story about a friend of mine, and it’s not really taking a side. There’s something innocent, even kind of naive, about the concept of being born again… and people on both sides read it differently.”
He seemed to like that. “It’s fun to see,” he said. “If people are getting different reactions, that’s kind of the point.”
There’s a reason Saint Motel took a minute to catch on. They didn’t follow trends, they didn’t play to expectations, and their frontman talks about mastering ambiguity like it’s a Jedi discipline. But somehow, by embracing maximalism and melody without irony, saintmotelevision became one of those rare pop records that doesn’t feel pinned to a year.
As for whether Jackson ever hears the final versions without remembering the demos, the changes, the remixes? Not really. But that’s okay.
“The songs still feel alive.”
Listen to the full interview above and then check out the video below.
