I talked with Jon Prophet recently, he’s a guitar player, singer-songwriter from Arizona. He shared some great insight on his journey thus far as a musician … his guitars, his musical influences, producing his album “New Religion“, and his inspiration and motivation for succeeding in music and life. With a bit of luck, look for his song, “Painted Horse” – see the video below, to be featured in a Harley- Davidson ad.
Interview with Jon Prophet
1. You mentioned that you’re a guitar buff, and have about 7 guitars at any one time, what are they and which ones are your favorites?
JP: I had an old Kay guitar that I loved and I wished I still owned it when I first started taking guitar lessons. That was my second guitar and my first electric guitar. I usually own some combination of a few acoustics; steel string, nylon string and maybe a 12 string I’ve owed a few Reso-Phonics over the years as well. Usually I’ll get lucky and find one of the cheaper brands that just plays excellent. My main axe for may years was a Tobacco Sunburst Fender American Strat from the late 90s that had the rolling nut which I thought was a brilliant edition to the design.
I’ve owned several electric Epiphones over the years; SGs, various hollowbodies and Les Pauls. But I never really bonded with them for some reason so I ended up trading them out. My favorites now are Fender Telecasters and the Republic Reso-Phonics. I like having a variety of sounds to pull from when writing so I borrow a lot of gear from friends who tend to collect way more than I do for the sake of writing. I also have an Epiphone acoustic with a nice tobacco sunburst finish that I do a lot of writing on. Each instrument inspires something different from me.
2. When you started getting serious about learning to play guitar, did you take lessons and what did you make the most progress with practicing?
JP: I really took it seriously when my school offered a guitar class when I was 15. The teacher was an old school bass player and was very proficient as such and as a band teacher but he certainly was no inspiration as a guitar player so I just learned theory from him and would come home and practice nearly 8 hours a day for about 2 years. I’d listen to the radio and jam along with the jazz station and the late night blues hour and then rock out to my favorite bands while trying to decipher the tab in the various guitar player magazines I’d collect.
I think at the end of the day you just have to put in the time on the instrument. That’s it! The second thing is that you have to truly and critically listen to music so you can hear what’s actually happening in there compositionally. What makes a great song great? If you break it down, you can start to get a sense of how and why it works. Of course there is a certain magic that is hard to pin-point but that, I think, is something you have to feel your way through.
3. For your album, A New Religion, can you share how it came to be? … From conception, to songwriting, to producing it.
JP: I was doing some recording work with a friend of mine in his garage studio and trying to get better recordings of the demos I was doing in my own home studio. (As an aside the pure acoustic tracks on A New Religion were actually recorded in my tile bathroom in the house I was living in at the time.) Anyway, I was also gigging out with my drummer David Cates and a sort of rotating line up of bassists around town.
At one of our shows, we were approached by a local PR person who loved the sound and wanted to meet with us so we took the meeting and he said he wanted to represent us. He didn’t really know the music business but he loved what we did and he had some contacts so at that point, that was enough. He ended up working out a deal for us to record at a really top notch studio called Chaton.
