Jack Newsome is an up-and-coming American singer, songwriter, and producer born in Rumson, New Jersey. Fans of NBC’s reality songwriting competition Songland may remember him from season one, where he teamed up with producer Shane McAnnally to write for country artist Kelsea Ballerini. The 25-year-old former Berklee student has also worked with artists like Meghan Trainor, Sean Kingston, Ryan Tedder, and more. We recently caught up with Newsome to discuss his disco-pop-infused EP All Dressed Up and his budding career as a solo artist. Check out his new single “Sorry For Your Loss,” available now on all platforms.
Okay, so let’s start with a fun one. What are you listening to right now?
Lil Nas X. Oh my god, I’m so proud of him. We all know he is a marketing genius. He’s a disrupter and anybody who fucks shit up when they’re making music is just awesome to watch. And the songs are so good! It just sounds like this came like pouring out of him and I don’t want albums that aren’t like that. [My favorite is] “That’s What I Want,” just because I’m a pop slut. Ryan Tedder is on it, so it was bound to be a good pop song. I also really love “Scoop,” the one with Doja Cat. I’m excited to explore [the album] further. That’s why I love albums so much. Everything nowadays, you consume it immediately and it’s done. An album, it takes a minute. You’re not supposed to know your favorite song or have one off the bat. You’re supposed to let it simmer and I love that shit.
You sing, you produce, you write songs for yourself and for other people. Do they all come to you naturally? Which one interests you the most?
The writing thing is what comes the most naturally right now, but we’ve also been in a pandemic for a year and a half now. I played my first two shows in so long like a month ago and it completely revitalized my artist’s brain. Like, “Oh, I write songs to be shared in a communal space with people.” And hopefully you can say the right thing at the right time for any of these people and you can make this moment. And that part of it was so lost for so long. Everyone in the world over the last year and a half was just fighting each other and being awful. Having these two shows, I was like, “I love singing and performing.” That part felt so foreign for so long, and I’m kind of falling back in love with that. I’m trying to figure out how to play more shows. Honestly, I hate that it’s becoming this, but I think live music is becoming more of a luxury. It’s for the few who are even allowed to. Like most countries still have stay at home orders. In the countries that are in the process of getting vaccinated and opening up a little more, just to get a show on the road, you have to have a lot of money, you gotta have your band, you gotta have your following. It’s becoming this big luxury to put on a good show.
So you produce music. I’m assuming you probably had a hand in producing a lot of your EP. Is that the case? You did a lot of that from home, right?
It was really cool because it was a lot of my production, as well as getting to work with some producers who I’ve admired for a really long time. And some who I’d just met. Turning in a finished product- especially if you want it to be a glossy pop project- takes a lot of care and detail. I’m the type of person who will slave away on a lyric and a melody for forever. But if I’m spending more than an hour getting a snare sound right, I freak out. I like to lay the bones and the foundation, but I love bringing in people who are so much better with sound selection and people who can get the finishing touches on things. I’ve learned that’s a way I work really well. I got to work with this guy Cambo who has done a bunch of stuff with Doja. And “All Dressed Up” was done by this British guy named Phil Cook. “Friends” was with my friend Jason Strong. He and I went to Berklee together. I was telling this to a friend of mine recently: Music is like a team sport. I am not one of those people who is too precious to not allow people in on the project. If you see my name as sole producer of the song, it’s because we didn’t have some crazy budget to work with and I just had to make it happen myself. And that’s totally fine. The only thing that matters is if the music is good. I check credits like a fiend like any time a song comes out.
When you’re looking at those writing credits, who do you get really jazzed up to see? Who are your producer crushes?
There’s a lot of Swedes who are just naturally so gifted, especially with pop stuff. I don’t know if he’s a producer, but Omer Fedi. He did a lot of the Lil Nas X stuff and he’s working with The Kid LAROI and he’s just on one right now. In terms of production, Max Martin, obviously, that’s a given. How can you not [worship him].
Do you know Ricky Reed?
Oh my god, Ricky Reed, obviously. He and Ian Kirkpatrick. The thing with Ricky is that he is really good at understanding where his artists come from and meeting them there, and not even somewhere in the middle. He worked on that new Camila Cabello record “Don’t Go Yet.” You wouldn’t know because he went full Hispanic. He went all the way there to a place where he wasn’t even recognizable. And then the stuff with Lizzo, he went there. It’s crazy. I aspire to that level of just knowing your shit.
The difference between my two favorite songs of yours- the disco bop “Friends” and the folky, This Is Us -fodder “Give It Back”- they are wildly different sides to you. Do you think you’ll lean into making more songs like “Give It Back” in the future?
Welcome to my struggle. It’s like, “Do we do a ballad today or do we do an upper?” Nothing excites me more than getting into a room with a crazy songwriter and not having any expectation- just writing to write, swinging for the fences. That’s kind of the way “Give It Back” was made. My friend came in and he had this guitar thing and he was like, “I’ve written six things over this chord progression. Do you think we can write THE song to it?” And I was like, “A challenge?! Lets go!” It’s really cool to be in that position where there’s not some writers in the room being like, “We have to write for YOU so how’s this idea?” There’s no frantic energy. Your head is just locked in. You’re trying to swing for the fences. And I think that’s the best and most enjoyable way to make stuff. I want it to come from an authentic place no matter what.
At some point this year, your first five songs were retroactively compiled into an EP called Prologue. What was the motive behind that ret-con?
I feel like I got nervous seeing them all as lonely singles on my Spotify and Apple music. I am a body-of-work kind of guy and if I can make it at least look like all of these things were meant to be together, I’m going to try to do that. I don’t know if it was the best move for them or if I should just let them live, but I really want to get to that place where I am an album artist. I think that was me trying to show my team that that was the direction we were going in. I’m very aware that I’m a 25-year-old pop singer/songwriter/producer and I don’t know if I’m going to have that, “Oh, he’s 17 and his first song ever just blew the fuck up.” There’s so many of those stories where it’s like overnight success. That isn’t me. I was part of two failed boy band projects by the time I was 18 years old. I have been doing this for a minute now. I want to get the point where I can turn in bodies of work and be like, “This is who I am.” I have three albums worth of songs almost ready to be released and I know what I’m worth, but other people don’t because I have to play the game and release an EP first. I’m realizing now that it’s a little bit bullshit. The only thing that matters is substance and things that exist that people can react to. If the shit isn’t out, it doesn’t exist.
Speaking of EPs, your follow up All Dressed Up shows a sonic progression from what ended up being Prologue. Was that due to different inspirations, changes in direction, or like you said, finding people to spend hours finding the right snare sound?
Future Nostalgia had come out during the pandemic and I was on my disco kick a few months prior to the pandemic. I was like, “Why do these songs all make me feel incredible? I feel like a superhero when I listen to these songs. Why?” So I made a playlist of all my favorite disco records and that was the only thing I listened to for months. “Friends” was written in February before the pandemic. I went on a writing trip to Sequoia and we got this house out in the mountains and wrote “Friends.” Then the world shut down and we had to reevaluate everything. I realized that those disco-sounding songs were still picking my ass up off the ground. Shit was hard. Everybody knows, everybody has struggled with it. I thought it was important to make this last EP uppers-heavy. There’s still [songs] like “Hurt People,” which is heart wrenching, and “The Year The World Stood Still” is about as personal as I’ve ever been. But I think it was really important to keep the uppers on it, because I needed it and I know that a lot of other people needed it.
We talked a little bit about producing stuff at home out of necessity. How does working remotely affect your creative process? Is it different for you having these Zoom sessions and not being able to sit with the people you’re working with?
For the work that was done on Zoom, I’ve noticed two things. 1. It’s less fun, and 2. It’s faster. I felt like I was in a place where I was ready for Zooms. If this is the new reality, I’m as ready as I can be. I’ll make my rig. I’ll change everything about the way I make music. But the Zoom thing is just those two things: It’s a shorter process, and slightly less fun. I did get to have a finishing camp in Lake Tahoe, which is my favorite place on Earth. I brought Cambo out and we had only really met on Zoom. We all got tested and we did a camp at his cabin on Tahoe. We got to go through all the songs and be like, “Okay, this is the EP. These are the songs that need finishing.” We worked on “Easy On Me” there. I laid the vocals for “Friends.” I brought him in on 10+ songs when we were at that camp. So that’s the thing- the in-person stuff is so much more memorable. At night, it was snowing and we would go on these walks and drink hot toddies. You can’t really make those kinds of memories on Zoom.
You released an early version of “Easy On Me” to Soundcloud last year. How did you approach revisiting that song to spruce it up for an official release?
That song was a creeper because I knew I liked the song, but what’s really hard is getting a whole team on board for something if they feel impartial or don’t know how to market it. The hardest part about this job is talking to music business people who don’t come from a writer/producer/artist background. They look at it like this foreign object that they have to spin into gold. Half the time, the song will do that for you. Sometimes it IS good enough, believe it or not. And so I put that out and I had really good industry feedback from other writers and producers out here in LA. And I told my team, “This song just keeps getting brought up in conversation,” to the point where my team was listening to it off the clock. And I was like, “Can we bring Cambo in on it and make it a reality? How do we make this real?”
So the Soundcloud version was the bare bones version?
Yeah, that was my total bare bones production. I use Lander to master things, which is a website where you pay a monthly subscription and you just feed it whatever bounces you have from the session and it makes it sound radio ready. I get a lot of shit for using it, but I’m like, ”Do you like the song? Do you like how it sounds?” That’s the only thing that matters and it makes it sound good out of my car. [“Easy On Me”] came from a real place where I was in a relationship at the time and I was putting so much pressure on myself to be a good boyfriend and I really don’t have all the answers. My parents are divorced. It didn’t work for them. I haven’t seen a functional relationship for very long in my life, so bear with me. I remember that week there were a bunch of other songs with a similar theme.
On Songland, you worked with Shane McAnnally and he has an insane resume for writing- Kelly Clarkson, Sam Hunt, Kacey Musgraves, Halsey. What did you learn from him?
That man is so great. I can’t stress enough how important that man is to my career. His biggest superpower is that he makes everyone he writes with feel like a genius and he never says no. He says, “Yes, but what if it was like this?” He doesn’t shoot anything down. He’s a total dreamer. He’s so refreshing to work with when so many people lead with their ego and they lead with their fear. This man leads with love and imaginativity. His imagination is really inspiring. I’ll tell my team all the time, “Is there any time I can get in with Shane?” and they’re like “He’s a busy guy…” but I’m always going to ask because I love that man.
Do you think you’ve figured out the characteristics of writers that you really enjoy? How has your opinion grown with the more experience you get?
I think a myth that people believe is that you have to work with everybody. No, you have to work with everybody in the beginning until you find the good ones, and you don’t have to work with the bad ones any longer. You can walk out of the session 10 minutes in if you want. You are not beholden to anyone or anything. Be nice, be a kind person. But there’s this myth that I bought into for a long time that you have to break your back for someone who won’t turn their head for you. You don’t have to do that. Find your tribe, find your people. I have come to realize that your manner in the session is as important (if not more important) than your actual writing abilities. I’m confident that I can get a song made by myself if I need it to happen. Half the time, I need somebody in the room who is adventurous. They’re down to go with you down a rabbit hole and down to unpack some trauma, get some therapy going, work on some things that might be harder for you to process alone. People who are not afraid, people who don’t shoot things down. If you’re funny and you can hang out, that can go a long way.
What are your plans for a full length debut and a tour?
Working on live show things. I’m playing with some new toys to incorporate into the live show. I don’t want to speak too soon about things, but I’m a fan of live pop shows, like big production shows, so I really want to develop a show that has all the bells and whistles but is doable at the same time for someone of my stature. And I want to sing my face off, so that’s my current plan for live stuff. There is new music coming. There’s going to be at least one new song before the end of the year, but now we are trying to get the next roll out in place. I’m indie again, so we are building the blocks and making sure the foundation is laid. Next comes the music. I wish there wasn’t business B.S. to deal with and we could just put the shit out and immediately play shows. That would be awesome.
Are you going to keep putting songs on Soundcloud?
I’ve been thinking about it, since we are in this weird place. It’s a great way to test the waters and I forget that people listen. Expectation is the thief of joy, I swear. I’ll put something on there and I’ll be like “It’s not doing what I hoped.” And I’ll forget that for the people who do listen and comment and share, not only will it stick with them, but it will change their day or mood. Maybe they’ll be having a shitty moment in their life and that will open the clouds for them. Soundcloud is one of the coolest, lowest pressure things for that. The numbers are deceiving because they’ve never mattered as far as how good the song is. Someone’s #1 song on their Spotify could be some random DJ feature they did for a fee, or it’s a song that got synced in a movie, and maybe their sound has changed since then. So it’s really deceiving.
[Popheads talked] to Jojo earlier this year about how her life was saved between when she couldn’t release music and she was releasing stuff on Soundcloud. It’s crazy how much it can mean to fans and to artists to be able to release things directly- things you know won’t come out, and you’re just like, “Fuck it, I want this to exist and be on the record.”
I think there’s this happy medium where you shouldn’t hold onto a song forever, but you also should give it the time it needs to fully bake. You should take it out of the oven at the right time. My roommates and I were talking about how cooking and making music are literally just the same thing, just slightly different. Once it’s out, it’s no longer yours and you just have to move on. I used to put my covers on Soundcloud. I should probably just get back on that horse. I just didn’t think anybody cared and then I would talk to somebody like you in my DMs being like, “FEED ME!” It’s good to know people are listening.
Interview conducted via Zoom by AJ Marks and Anna Pollitt. Written by Anna Pollitt. Reposted from r/popheads.
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