Jay Aston laughs when you suggest he should’ve burned out by now. “Most bands make a couple of great records and then, ten years later, meh,” he shrugs. “But for some reason I just keep on growing as a writer. Still got a lot to learn.” He says this without irony, even though his band Gene Loves Jezebel has been knocking around since the Reagan era.
The new record, Dance Underwater, wasn’t supposed to happen. “Every time we’d play a festival, the band would say, ‘We should make a record.’ Then we’d all fly home and forget,” Aston admits. Finally, after another gig in Portugal, he snapped: “I said, guys, I’m sick of you. If you want to make a record, do something about it.” Bassist Pete Rizzo called his bluff, set up a Pledge campaign, and suddenly forty grand appeared. “Fair play to Pete,” Aston says. “We reached the target easily.”
Aston wrote most of the songs, though Rizzo found himself unexpectedly co-piloting. “He’s an amazing bass player, but he’d never really written songs,” Aston says. That changed after their side project Ugly Bugs—“very theatrical, wigs, makeup, synths”—bled into the Jezebel sessions. One of those tracks, “How Do You Say Goodbye to Someone,” even got the royal treatment: producer Tony Visconti heard it and decided it needed a string arrangement.
They kept it lean. “No time wasted, no fat on it,” Aston says. “Everyone worked really hard. It was the most band-like record we’ve ever made.” Producer Peter Walsh (who’d been behind some of the band’s earlier LPs) helmed the sessions in Barry Barlow’s countryside studio. “Barry from Jethro Tull! He owns the studio, lovely guy,” Aston enthuses. “We just dug straight in.”
And despite the built-in nostalgia that comes with a band still trading under the same name as 1985, Aston insists this isn’t a retro play. “It would be so easy to make a cynical record, a dark Brexit-y record,” he says. “But I wanted to kick against that and make something positive. Blue skies, sun, optimism. That was the point.”
The optimism bleeds through. New songs like “Chase the Sun” and “Summertime” close their sets, not the old hits. “Pretty unusual, right? Ending with a ballad. But it really moves people,” Aston says. “It livens everyone up—it makes us feel fresh too. You’re not just rehashing.”
Not that legacy doesn’t follow him around. Lady Gaga, Blur, Smashing Pumpkins, Mountain Goats—they’ve all name-checked Jezebel. The Pumpkins even asked Aston to sing live with them. “It’s nice when people like you, obviously,” Aston says. “But it doesn’t matter to me as a human being. I just make music. Therapy, really. I don’t sit down and think, ‘Must write a song today.’ Never have.”
He’s grateful that the band never became self-parody. “That’s the fear for any band of our age, right? To go Steely Dan and make something that sounds like 1985 again. But we’ve never done that,” he says. “I like melodies, I like songs. There’s never any games with us. Every song has to be different, but it has to sound like us. And I couldn’t be happier with this record.”
Listen to the interview above and then check out "Summertime" below!
