Jesse Barton (Alive in Barcelona)

He graduated at 16, jumped into the chaos of touring, and learned the music business the hard way, by selling CDs in parking lots, sleeping in cars, and betting on himself when nobody else would. We talk with hard rock artist and manager Jesse Barton about the real mechanics behind building a band from the ground up: booking shows through MySpace, getting onto bigger bills by promising ticket sales, and turning face-to-face fan connection into a lasting audience.

Then we get into the stuff artists usually learn too late. Jesse breaks down record deal basics like advances, recoupment, and royalty splits, plus what happens when a label deal feels like a breakthrough but turns into a logistical and financial trap. He shares how those mistakes reshaped the way he reads contracts, runs merchandising, and protects long-term momentum, and why “more money, more problems” is not just a lyric when you finally see touring at a higher level.

The conversation goes deeper into studio recording and modern production, from early sessions that exposed weak prep to building cleaner workflows in Pro Tools. Jesse also opens up about loss, how music became a lifeline after his dad died, and how construction skills helped him build a world-class recording studio in Spokane. We wrap on perspective, why success is relative, and how working as an artist manager lets him help others avoid the potholes he hit first.

If you like honest music industry stories, touring lessons, and practical advice for independent musicians, hit subscribe, share this with a friend, and leave a review. What part of Jesse’s journey hit you the hardest?

Episode Links

• Alive in Barcelona: https://www.aliveinbarcelona.com/
• Carl Tatz: https://jayfranze.com/episode24/
• Bob Bullock: https://jayfranze.com/episode28/

Transcript

Live Intro And Guest Welcome

Jay Franze 0:33

And we are coming at you live. I am Jay Franzi, and uh with me tonight the Morty to my Rick, my beautiful co-host, Miss Tiffany Mason.

SPEAKER_00 0:42

Yes, happy to be here. Excited to dive in.

Jay Franze 0:45

If you are new to the show, this is your source for the latest news, reviews, and interviews. And if you'd like to join in, comment, or fire off any questions, please head over to jfranzie.com. All right, my friend. Tonight we have a very special guest with us. I said it once, I will say it again. We have a very special guest. We have a hard rock recording artist and manager hailing from the great state of Washington. We have Jesse Barton. Jesse, my friend, thank you for joining us. Absolutely. Thank you guys for having me. It is an absolute pleasure. A pleasure of ours, sir. Heck yeah. We would like to just dive right in because we only have four hours with you tonight. So we'd like to dive in and get as much out of those four hours as we can. All right, let's do it. Tell us what it was like leaving school at 16 years old to go on the road.

Leaving School To Chase Music

SPEAKER_03 1:39

Oh, chaotic. Uh you know, I was always the youngest kid in my class, but I decided I was gonna graduate a year early so that I could pursue music. And convincing my parents to allow me to do that was definitely tough. I was starting to uh get in trouble a little bit around school and uh, you know, do things I shouldn't. And so I said, you know, screw this. I I don't like going to school and I'm just gonna get this over with. So I just did a ton of credits in my summer uh to be able to graduate a year early. So I graduated in 2008 at 16 and yeah, I started a band. By the time I was 25, I'd signed two record deals and had a top 100 song on the radio and just made it happen.

Jay Franze 2:24

Well, before we get that far, how were you booking gigs at 16 years old?

SPEAKER_03 2:29

It was MySpace, like that's all we had. We didn't have Facebook at the time. You know, Reverb Nation was kind of like a huge thing back then where you could go upload a track or whatever, and it was kind of like the the artist version of MySpace, so to speak. Everyone had a profile, you'd get messages on there to come play a show, but it I mean, really, it was it was a lot of word of mouth. If it wasn't a MySpace message, it was word of mouth. I mean, heck, we played a lot of really random stuff, like people's birthday parties or an open mic at the church, or I was working for a hot topic at the local mall, and we had this thing called the local static where they'd get these bands in the area from all the different hot topic stores to come in and do acoustic sets at the the store. So, like some of those were my first gigs.

Jay Franze 3:16

Did that help you learn how to build a following?

Early Gigs Through MySpace Hustle

SPEAKER_03 3:19

The retail job that I had, I got really good at talking to people and you know, networking through that. And so, I mean, it all helped. Even if there was five people in the crowd, it all helped. It teaches you what not to do, it teaches you what you got to do better. Um, you know, a lot of it was just trial and error when I was a kid. And when I started this whole thing, I just wanted to play in you know our quote unquote local scene in Spokane opening for my favorite bands. You know, that's all I wanted to do. Well, tell us more about that. The local promoter for the hardcore scene up here, his name's Ryan Levy. He has uh monumental booking, and I remember seeing bands that I was listening to at the time coming through and and monumental booking had put those on, and I would hit up Ryan and be like, Hey, we need to be on the show. And he would say, Look, the the booking agent doesn't want any locals on the show, like it doesn't need it. The package is strong enough by itself. And I said, Well, tell that guy we're gonna sell a hundred tickets, and sometimes we'd only sell 50 of those, and I just come up with the rest of the money to to buy the rest so that we could be on the bill. Did you even have any music or merch to sell at the time? We had gone to Rochester Hills, Michigan, track an album over there, and when we cut that record, we started following warp tour around, forcing our way in, and we didn't have any tour badges or nothing. Like we just showed up and grinded and sold CDs. I I remember that first full summer, which was 2012, we were in a we were in a Mitsubishi Lancer with like like 500 CDs, and we had printed one t-shirt, and we had printed 50 of that t-shirt. And I said, Look, if we can sell one to two of these, they'll be gone by the end. And we sold all of them the very first day. We just sold the hell out of it, you know, and it like really helped us interact with people that would eventually become our fans face to face, which in a scene that's not mainstream was so helpful because you spend five minutes with somebody, they're a fan for life. And by the end of that first summer, I think we sold$50,000 worth of merchandise, and we were like, all right, we're we're in it now. We made so many connections doing that. You know, after maybe two weeks of being nobody's in the parking lot, we ended up getting in with the promoters for warp tour and the head of security and all that. So we eventually did get passes to be there, and that just kind of kicked everything off for us. Everything we did in our early days directly came from the people that we had met doing those first one or two warp tours.

Jay Franze 5:48

Just want to say that 500 CDs would take up almost the entire space of a Lancer.

Warped Tour Merch Grind Lessons

SPEAKER_03 5:53

Oh, you have no idea, man. We didn't even have AC in this thing, and we slept in this sucker every single day. Five weeks of of warp tour, you know, going through Florida in the middle of August, just dying, you know, in this car. But we did what we had to do. The following year, we ended up buying a van and trailer and bringing six of our friends with us, and we had a whole outfit going at that point. And then by the time we were done, we were in a bus. So it's uh yeah, it's been quite the ride.

Jay Franze 6:18

That's why I don't want to know what it smelled like.

SPEAKER_03 6:23

Although we're uh I I got a funny story about that. At one point in our first van, we had this little uh this little mini fridge between the front two seats, and I'd stripped all the seats out of the back, and we'd built this like bunk deal, you know, that we it would fold up into seats. You know, we had seven of us sleeping in the back of this thing, like five on top, two underneath, and this this little mini fridge between the front two seats, and there was like some orange juice in there, and that sucker got unplugged while we went and did our thing at warp tour and completely spoiled, and we never we never got rid of that smell. I mean, that that smell was in the van until we sold it like six years later. Was it a selling feature of the oh goodness, I had to spray two bottles of Febreze in there just to get that thing sold.

SPEAKER_00 7:08

So wow, I'm so impressed by your perseverance at such a young age. Like you really set a goal and really went for it.

SPEAKER_03 7:15

It was in the name, you know. We were the persevering promise. I have I have persevere tattooed on my hand, like that's just all I knew. I I had zero backup plan, you know. Like when I was coming home from whether we were playing a tour or just like following a tour and selling stuff, I was swinging a hammer doing construction, you know. I I did that with my dad since I was 14, and like that's just not what I wanted to do. I was like, I'm gonna be famous and I'm gonna start a band, and there wasn't there was no backup plan.

SPEAKER_00 7:43

What was that like with the band, the dynamics of being persevering?

SPEAKER_03 7:48

Matt Hose, he's the he's the vocalist of Alive in Barcelona and was the vocalist of The Persevering Promise. Chase Williams, our drummer, all of us have played music together since fresh out of high school, or in Chase's case, he was in college. Matt and I both kind of had we both had type A personalities and we both thought we were in charge for the longest time. And it and it made it a little tough. But eventually, I think he realized like I was getting pretty damn good at this, you know, especially the development of our band and our image and branding and all this stuff. And so he eventually did kind of take a back seat, but he has always been like my right-hand man. In fact, I've never done anything professionally that did not involve those two. And so, you know, the six the success is all of ours as far as like you know, right there every day, and and Matt really does come up with the core elements of the original idea of a song, and I have taken those from there, put them in Pro Tools, and produced the music. So it's yin and yang, like we can't do it without each other.

Jay Franze 8:48

So, at what point was it that you guys had your first break?

First Break And A Bad Deal

SPEAKER_03 8:53

Uh man, it's been so long now that it's hard for me to remember exactly. But I want to say that we had done like two months of touring in maybe 2013 or 14. I guess maybe it was actually that 2012 year. We did two months of touring and we had met some dude, his name's Jordan Washam. I'm actually still buddies with him today, but I had I had reached out to this band on MySpace called the Paramedic. I tried to set up a show with them because this guy, Jordan Washam, was like, hey, hit this band up. You can play shows with them. And this band was like, tell that son of a you know, SOB that he owes me money. And like they were coming at me about it. And it's it's just kind of funny looking back at it now because eventually, after we got all that out of the way, we ended up doing a tour with them. And then we ended up doing like a two-month tour all through the eastern half of the US. And like, I'm from a small town in Idaho, I've never been anywhere over there, like at all. So, you know, we hopped in a van and trailer and started doing this thing. And I remember the shows were not doing super great. At one point, we had like$50 left in our this little mic envelope that was kind of paying for our gas money and stuff. And the show that we were supposed to have that night was in Atlanta, Georgia, and we got word 30 minutes from the venue that the show was going to cancel. And we had like, I think, 10 days until the next tour started. So we had just put that last 50 bucks in the tank, and now we're straight broke, and we got nowhere to be for 10 days. And out of nowhere, I get a text from my dad who said he had met up, uh, like reconnected with some old high school buddy who had a place in South Carolina that he was gonna flip. He was about to fly out there, and we were like 45 minutes away. I don't know, maybe we were further, but we were we were within driving distance. So we ended up going and staying at this place and like mowing the grass and painting stuff and whatever for for a week. And we're we're getting fed, we're getting beer, you know, which is all we really gave a shit about at the time. Uh, and basically made enough money to like get to the next tour and finish it out. And you know, I'm like, Dad, we'll see you back home in a month. And we finished that thing out, and and through that tour, uh uh a label called Pavement Records, who they had tantric and some other bands that they were kind of washed up radio bands, but they still like were names that we knew, and we didn't know any better, so we're like, Yeah, this is our big break. Let's sign a record deal. And that turned out to be an absolute nightmare. But at the time it did kind of feel like our first big break, you know what I mean? What was the nightmare? Oh man, so I have learned a ton about contract law since then. Um we I I wasn't I wasn't stupid, like I wasn't dumb about it then, but we had negotiated things so hard in our contract that I think ultimately they just were like, okay, well, if you want the contract like that, we're not gonna dump any money into you. And the biggest thing for me was most record deals are set up where whatever advance you get is a recoupable balance and you only recoup out of your artist percentage. So, like, say you have an 80-20 split in the label's favor, which is this was a huge thing back in the day. 80-20 splits all the time. So you get a$20,000 loan and you're only recouping on 20%, then your band has to generate$100,000 to pay back the 20. Meanwhile, the label's sitting on I don't even know what the math is on that,$400,000, I think. So before we had signed that, I said, look, we'll do the deal, but everything goes to recoup before anybody takes a split, which was great, but then they didn't want to spend any money. And so it it just got to this point. Like at first, it was great. You know, we were you know, we're getting our CD press, we're getting merch, getting all this stuff, but at one point we had basically run out of CDs doing the warp tour grind, and we needed albums like the next day. And I remember the AR rep there was like, Well, we don't work on the weekends, so we're not gonna ship them out till Monday, which was gonna put us like almost a week until we had seen them. And at that point, the tour is moving every single day. We're not gonna, you know, what the hell do we do for a week? We were in Connecticut at the time, and we ended up loading up everybody that we had and all of our stuff, and we drove from Connecticut all the way back to Spokane, Washington in three days, dropped everyone off, got back in that Mitsubishi Lancer, and went back to Minnesota to join the tour again to get the CDs that they were gonna send us and sell the rest of the album so that we could just recoup our money because the split was bad. It was a nightmare. So at that point, we had this clause in our contract that basically the final say on the album was up to us. And I basically told him, Look, we're gonna go in a studio on your guys' diamond record open B for 45 minutes and turn that in as a record, and you're gonna keep rejecting it, and I'm gonna keep doing the same damn thing unless you let us out of this deal. And so we we got out of the deal, we got the rights to our music back, and then we turned around and redistributed it and did the whole thing again the next summer, and it was just night and day difference. I think we came home with enough to do what we had to do. So again, even when you make mistakes and it it goes bad, like you're still learning so much and learning what not to do. Yeah, uh that that's where it went sour, but it I knew what to look for on the next record deal.

Jay Franze 14:27

All right, well, before we get to the next record deal, you mentioned earlier going to Michigan to record. Yeah. So can you describe what that recording situation was like at that time?

First Real Studio And Hard Lessons

SPEAKER_03 14:39

Yeah, so the guy's name is Matt Dalton. 37 Studios is the name of the studio, and there was a band that we were, you know, they were really big in the scene that we're from at the time. They're called Chyotos, and Craig Owens is the vocalist of Chyotos, and Craig Owens had partial ownership of the studio, they had recorded there. Another band called IC Stars had recorded there, and again, I think this is still the MySpace days. So I think I had like found an email address or something on MySpace and reached out to Matt Dalton. And I'd never been to like a real studio, you know, at this point. And so I basically convinced my dad to give me like 400 bucks to give me a deposit to get that studio time locked in and the college radio station in Moscow, Idaho, which is the other place that I kind of bounced back and forth from. Anthony Saya was the the DJ's name, and you know, he was all he was all about helping us from the beginning. He flew out with us, the band flew out. We went and sat in the studio in Michigan for 21 days and and uh made our first legitimate album, which which was really cool, you know. Uh uh, I still like to go back and listen to it just to see how far I've come. And you know, there's there's things I really like about it. So that was really cool. But one thing that we learned very quick was like, you know, back in the day we were the kind of band that all sat in a room together to write every single song, and you don't always know if everything that you guys are playing together, like with the band, is like cohesive when it comes to laying it down in Pro Tools. So, you know, we were having to change kick patterns for the drums and things like that on the spot, and it created a lot of tension with our drummer chase. I mean, there was blow-ups, there was all kinds of stuff. I mean, we did we just didn't know what we didn't know because we hadn't been there. But, you know, obviously we've made it through that. We've been we've been playing music together almost 20 years now, and everything that we do now is like I mean, I have the sessions freaking done before I even go to the studio. I have everything done and everything memorized, and there's a part of it that I miss because just being in a room with your buddies and like hashing a song out start to finish, there's so much more feeling in the writing process. But the end product, especially if you're trying to be in a commercially viable space, the end product is so much cleaner and better when you've hashed it out on Pro Tools before really before you even get in a room and play it for the first time together.

Jay Franze 17:07

All right. So on that note, we talked about the studio in Michigan, but I'd like to get a feel for the size of it and what kind of equipment, just general, like what size was the studio?

SPEAKER_03 17:18

It was big, man. I I don't know for sure that it was an SSL console, but it was big. I mean, you're talking 40 channels with you know loads of rackier. The library felt like a basketball court to me. I mean, it was it was huge, you know. He had every amp and drum combination you could possibly imagine. So for us, especially as teenagers, it was like being a kid in a candy store. That would have been, I want to say probably 2010 or 11 that that we did that. So so I guess at that point I've been out of high school for a couple years, but um, I mean, I was I don't even know if I was 18, to be honest with you.

Jay Franze 17:55

Do you remember the cost of the studio?

SPEAKER_03 17:58

I want to say that we spent$4,000 for an EP. Um, I want to say it was nine songs, and yeah, it took 21 days to make.

Jay Franze 18:08

That's a pretty good deal.

SPEAKER_03 18:09

It was, and it's not I've had producers that like, you know, we're staying at their studio, but we're only working with them from like 5 p.m. at night till three in the morning. So that that$4,000 was like studio time, lodging, and we're talking sun up to sundown working on record. So it was it was pretty stinking cheap.

Jay Franze 18:28

It's very cheap. I've worked in studios that are$4,000 for the day. Oh, 100%. Just to rent the studio.

Grief And Building A Recording Studio

SPEAKER_03 18:36

Yep, absolutely. So on the studio note, I guess it would have been even before, you know, what the band has become, which is alive in Barcelona, was the rebrand in 2016. Even before that happened, my my father died in 2015, and you know, I was kind of lost. Like I'd been going out and doing the warp tour thing and and doing shows, you know, here and there, and every time I'd come home, I'd I'd basically go live at a construction site. I'm not, I'm not kidding, like literally live there. Like we'd flip a house and I'd have a room upstairs and like a pad on the floor. And so I was working for my dad between all these tours, getting paid like$14 an hour cash, and that just fueled my dream. Well, 2015 he he died. I was actually playing a show with a band called Powerman 5000. Um, and he didn't show up to guest list, which it wasn't really that awkward at the time because sometimes he came to the show, sometimes he didn't. Again, this is like a two-hour drive. So we did that show the following day. We were shooting a music video, and I was going back to work on, I believe, a Tuesday, and on the way down there, I had gotten a call that the owners of the property that we were living in had found my dad dead. And that destroyed me. You know, I was 23 years old. My dad was only 55. I'd just been with him two days before, grinding away at work, building a retaining wall, and and all of a sudden he's not here. So I no longer have a place to live, and I no longer have my best friend or my dad. I don't have a job anymore because I was working for him. And one of my best friends to this day, his name's Jimmy Hill. He had a studio in Spokane called Amplified Wax, and they were renting this old theater. His lease was up, they were gonna double his rent or something. So he was like, I'm buying a building and I need I need someone to build it. And this place was just a probably an 80 by 60 cinder block building with a weed grow-up inside, like the hydroponic systems and stuff. So that's what I started with. And Jimmy had the vision. I had a little bit of know-how on doing construction. And Jimmy and I, and my younger brother Josh, who also plays music, we built the largest recording studio this side of the Cascades, and that studio is still there. We built that sucker into a multi-million dollar studio, and now every band that has come in and out of that studio, I've had a small part in. So that's been pretty cool. You know, having a place to record locally, being great friends with the producer. Every time I walk in there, it just I get a smile on my face, you know.

Jay Franze 21:13

That leads me to the the next step. But before we go there, sorry for the loss, sir.

SPEAKER_03 21:18

I appreciate it, man. It's uh I'll tell you what, I was I was just partying and playing music for years, and you know, when that happens, you have to grow up really fast. And you know, my my mother was still, you know, my mom was still alive, but my parents divorced when I was young, and for a lot of years, my mom and I had a really hard relationship, and that didn't necessarily help. So I had a place to go, of course, but it I felt like I lost everything. Luckily, you know, over the years, you know, as I've gotten older and smarter and realized that I don't know everything, you know, my mom and I did rekindle our relationship and had a wonderful relationship, but unfortunately the Whole thing has happened to me again. My my mom and my mom's mom just died in October on the same day, and it was again out of nowhere. Like my grandma, we knew was coming. My mom was completely unexpected, and it's it's happened to me again. This time I'm not flat on my back. You know, I've got I've got my own family, and uh yeah, man, life life is life is hard, and luckily I've had music to help get me through that and get the things that I feel and hear, you know, out on out on paper and it'll let me heal.

Jay Franze 22:36

Alright, so take us to the the more recent music, the recording of that. Tell us about the studio time there and what it was like recording the newer music.

SPEAKER_03 22:46

That's the studio that I built. That is Amplified Wax and Spokane. And you know, since then we've had huge artists come through. Tech Nine came in there and did some songs, a band called Memphis May Fire, which is a huge band in the in the rock scene that I am a part of. Their vocalist is from here. They came in there and did some drum stuff. I've brought Escape the Fate and Born of Osiris through the studio. Zed, you know, the guy that wrote Clarity came in there to arrange the song in the studio. You know, so we've got platinum plaques on the wall now. It's pretty cool, but that's where I was. In fact, I went to the studio March 7th to do a Lincoln Park cover because I've just I just missed doing it. Um, like I was, and I was like, you know what? I haven't seen Jimmy in a while. Let's get in there and do something. And I wanted to shoot video for that, so I I hit up my friend Dawson, who plays in a band called The Ongoing Concept, and he was like, Hey, should we bring a fog machine? And I'm like, dude, we're just doing Instagram stuff, we don't need that. And Jimmy is still mad from when we shot the back to life video because he always claims that the fog machines got you know like grime all over the amps and stuff. And and I had said that to him like a week before, and or maybe it was two days before. And then the day that we woke up to go, I got uh notification from Facebook showing 10 years ago to the date I'm in that studio recording with Jimmy and and Dawson is doing doing the video, and that that's the studio we built in Spokane, Washington. It's become world-class. We actually had Carl Tats, who Jay, I saw you might be friends with. Carl Tats came up and did the Phantom Focus System in that place, and it's incredible. It's it's a wonderful place.

Phantom Focus Monitoring And Studio Craft

Jay Franze 24:23

All right, let's talk about Carl for a second. Okay. Carl, previous guest of the show. He came and put a phantom focus system in my studio. Hell yeah. And I met him while I was working for a producer named Bob Bullock, who he also put a phantom focus system in his studio. We had a lot of involvement with Carl Tats. What was your experience like working with him?

SPEAKER_03 24:44

Jimmy and I actually went to this music, it was supposed to be a music conference uh put on by this Christian organization that was trying to do this warp tour style tour. And we got you know asked to come to this thing, and you know, it was basically supposed to be like a a panel of judges and labels and all this stuff, and we're gonna go play this thing. So Jimmy comes with me, and it turns out to be exactly the opposite of what we think it's gonna be. It's it's really uh like a Christian festival put on by music people, and at the time, like we're the only secular band there. Again, I had just lost my dad, so I'm like, I'm pretty angry at the world, and and we play metal core music, so like it's singer-songwriter stuff, and I'm up there screaming on the stage. And I remember one of the panelists being like, Man, you seem really angry. And I'm like, I freaking am, you know, I've had a lot I've been going through. And anyway, so Jimmy came down with me, and we ended up going to Blackbird Studios down there, and we weren't that impressed with their monitoring system, and all this stuff just seemed like super cheap gear. I, you know, I don't think that the you know, the dozens of gold records they have on the wall were done in that room. I think they were renting it out to whoever wanted to do it. And I guess through that experience, Jimmy was like had either heard Carl Tatz's name or he knew him in advance or something. And and when I was at this conference, my my brother Josh and Jimmy ended up going to Carl's setup and hearing a Phantom Focus system in person, and I wasn't there, so they're just coming back to me like, oh my god, this is the most amazing thing you've ever heard. It's like being in a fishbowl of sound, and I'm like, cool, man, whatever. I you know, I I I'll take your word for it, I guess. And when we finally got that studio built, he had Carl come up, and I got to sit down there and listen to the Phantom Focus system for the first time. And he was not lying. It is an unbelievable experience, man. It's like, you know, Carl comes in with these lasers and you know sets the speakers up directly for the height of the engineer. And, you know, if you have a chair that moves up and down, like you bolt that stinking thing in place so that it can't move up and down, so that that laser focus is always correct for the engineer. And it's it's like the most badass thing to do. Go sit in that chair at the studio and and play some some music and just have it literally be like you're inside of the mix. It's crazy. So, like, thank you. Thank you, dude. Your stuff is awesome.

Jay Franze 27:14

He is impressive, and I mean, he put one in my house, and it sounded awesome.

SPEAKER_03 27:19

Yeah, Jimmy has now got a phantom focus system at his house as well, so he can do mixes at his house. And and Carl came and uh put that one in too.

Jay Franze 27:27

Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, Miss Tiffany, you had the opportunity when we were at Bob's studio, when you heard his music, it was through a Phantom Focus System as well.

SPEAKER_00 27:35

Yeah, I was having flashbacks just listening, listening to the conversation. I was thinking, that's why Bob was so excited about that chair and got a little bit of a little bit of a little bit crazy, man.

Jay Franze 27:44

Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. So the studio itself, the the one that you built, can you tell us what it is now you do when you go in there, what work you do out of it?

SPEAKER_03 27:56

Well, you know, I was always going in there for for my own band. And when I was building that place, I made Jimmy a deal. I said, Look, I don't I don't want to do construction anymore. Like, I want to do music and I want to learn pro tools and all that stuff. And so we made a deal. Like, I cut him, you know, a pretty good rate on the construction labor in exchange for him teaching me what he knows. So for a while there, I was coming in and I was recording rappers and rock bands and whoever I could uh just to get experience. And uh, you know, throughout the years I've realized that standing way too close to my amplifier has destroyed my ears. And so I don't have the ears to be a producer, like or a mixer, I should say. But I'm really good at taking a an idea that might just be on an acoustic guitar and some vocals and turning that into a full band song. And so, you know, while I don't I don't put out mixes that I do or anything like that, I'll I'll do the demos and and all of the guitar tracking and you know whatever MIDI profiling we got to do, you know, at my home studio, and then I'll take it down there to Jimmy's and and we'll turn it into what's gonna be the final. So I still I still do that out of there. And uh yeah, when I go into the studio next, it'll probably be to do more music for live in Barcelona. All right.

Jay Franze 29:13

You've mentioned Pro Tools a couple times, so I want you to take a second to explain that soon.

Pro Tools Live Rig Meltdown Story

SPEAKER_03 29:20

Uh man, you went deep, didn't you? That is uh that's a great story, actually. So we were on tour with uh a band called the Red Jumpsuit Apparatus and another band called Alisanta, and again, both these bands, you know, I grew up listening to, and so having the opportunity to do that was really cool. We were playing a sold-out show at a place called the Chameleon Club, which I believe is in Pennsylvania somewhere. When I play guitar on stage live, I don't have a single pedal like on the stage, like I have zero effects pedals because I use something called an AxeFX, which is basically every amp and effect and cab and mic and all that stuff you could possibly want in a two-space rack. And I create a vocal chain, uh, or I'm sorry, uh a guitar chain, like my whole guitar rig inside of that axe effects. But I use MIDI through Pro Tools to control the parameters of the AxeFX. And so what I mean by that is if I have a guitar part that's like a heavy rhythm part for the chorus of a song and it's just distorted chugs or whatever, and then the bridge or the verse comes out and it's clean guitar with some reverb and delay. I don't press any buttons to get there. The MIDI inside of Pro Tools, the cursor goes past that MIDI parameter and it changes my patch for me. So we're at the chameleon club, and my computer is freezing every single song, which is super embarrassing because like all of the backing tracks, all that stuff is on Pro Tools, and the laptop would freeze every single song. So we finally get to the last song, and I'm like, screw it, we're going without the rig. I don't want it to freeze. This is all happening in like a two-second decision to be like, hey, we're going without the backing tracks. Well, I forgot that my computer and my Pro Tools control my axe effects, and we start that song, and it's a total shit show. So I I literally got off that stage so angry at the situation because it's a sold-out show. There's probably close to five, six hundred people there, and I was embarrassed and just livid because you know, we're like stoked on the show, and now we've just bossed the hell out of it, and we're probably not going to sell any merch tonight. So I walked out of there just to get some air, and I happened to walk past a tattoo shop, and I walked into that tattoo shop and I said, Look, man, can you pull up the Pro Tools logo for me? I want to get the Pro Tools logo with the F-word underneath, and that's just how I'm feeling today. And I walked back into that venue after my band has loaded everything off, and and Alexana's tour manager was like, they saw me walk in and and her name's Aaron, and she was like, Jesse, come over here. And the whole band like gave me a hug, and they're like, dude, we're so sorry. We've all been there. And I was like, check out this tattoo. And they're like, Oh my god, I can't believe you did that. And so I can look back at it now and laugh about it, but uh yeah, it's it's a funny story.

Jay Franze 32:28

Well, I only asked the question because Pro Tools is my daily driver, so I saw that made me chuckle.

SPEAKER_03 32:34

It's my fault because I was basically taking our sessions, you know, and running all of my plugins on the channels and you know, running like you know, 15 different tracks at the same time. And so my CPU was just like the processing was through the roof. And so, like literally the next day we had an off day, I bounced everything down to as many, you know, baked all the plugins right onto the tracks, and never had I've never had an issue again.

Jay Franze 33:02

I don't know if I would ever trust any system to run like that at a last year.

SPEAKER_03 33:07

Yeah, yep. Live and learn, man. Live and learn. That's gonna be rough. What's crazy is I did that for like, I don't know, six years, and I never once had my computer freeze on me like that. Yeah, it was just a weird thing. It happened every single song, and and then it never happened again. Of course, like I said, I bake all the plugins and everything in, but uh, yeah, it's been solid for me since. I know a couple of my buddies will run Reaper Live uh because the the processing power is so minimal compared to Pro Tools, and a lot of people use Ableton or Logic, and I just Pro Tools is what I know, so you know that's what I'm sticking with.

Jay Franze 33:40

Yeah, I'm with you. It's the same way. I mean, that's all we use in the studio. So all right, so let's move forward to the the second record deal.

Tour Management And Industry Reality

Rebrand To Alive In Barcelona

COVID Hits Touring And Venues

SPEAKER_03 33:51

Okay, so again, dad died in 2015. That was in January of 2015. In October of 2015, I got offered to be the tour manager for a band called Escape the Fate. And Escape the Fate was going on tour with A Skylet Drive, Sworn In, Micah Relocate, Sirens and Sailors, and there might have been one other band on there. But those were all bands that I used to listen to growing up. And for me, it was like making it to the big time because we're gonna be in a tour bus now and basically be at the level that I had been trying to be at forever. Now, granted, I'm not playing, but I'm still part of it, and so that was really cool for me. But through that experience, I realized that like, you know, Jay Z has a line that says more money, more problems. And it was so true. I just realized, like, even though they were where I wanted to be, they had all the exact same problems that we did. And they had made bad record deals and they had made bad merchandising deals. And I don't want to blow those guys out, but let's just say that those dudes didn't go home with any more money than I would have doing my own tour. And then we were doing, you know, 500 to 1,000 cap venues, sometimes 1500 cap venues, and we grossed six figures on that tour. It shouldn't have been the way it was. And I just saw that even if you get to that level, like you can still have the same problems if you are mismanaged or you don't know what you're walking into, or you just blindly sign stuff. And so Matt was on that tour with me as well. He was he was selling merch for him, so he got to see all this stuff firsthand too. And we came home from that and we're like, you know what? We've been playing to 250, 300 people for six years. Like, what we're doing now isn't going to get any more traction or grow us a bigger, bigger audience or any of that. So we were like, screw it, we're shaking it all back to the drawing board and we're starting over. And so uh we you know changed the group's name to Alive in Barcelona, and the first song that we wrote was about my dad dying. Uh, it's called Back to Life, and Steve Aiello from 30 Seconds to Mars helped us write that song. And before we even put it out, I had showed somebody that song. And without my knowledge, he had shared that song, and we had basically been hit up by a guy that runs active rock radio for the whole country, and he was like very interested in getting on board as a management deal and getting our songs on the radio. So, like the very first show we played was with Lacey Sturm of Fly Leaf, and it was 1200 people sold out. So, like, we knew right then and there we had made the right decision. We ended up going to Las Vegas and doing a festival called Too Broke to Rock with a bunch of washed up radio bands, frankly. You know, we we played with Scott Staff uh from Creed and Crazy Town and like Sick Puppies and some bands like that, Alien Ant Farm, whatever. Anyway, through all of that, we put an album together and we ended up flying to Baltimore to record with Paul Levitt is his name. He had done a ton of records that at the time I was really into. You know, he'd done All Time Low and Darkest Hour and Hey Monday and a band called Eye the Breather, who I ended up working for later. But anyway, we wrote this record in 2016. It's our self-titled album, Alive in Barcelona self-titled. And that record had been done in 2016, and it was literally sitting there completed for three years, and we weren't gonna release it unless we put it out on a label. And eventually Smart Punk was like, hey, we're totally into this, like we're down to do it. And again, like I said before, we learned what to do and what not to do on record contracts. And uh we signed a a deal that I was stoked on, they were stoked on. Uh they put up you know money for us to do radio, and two of those 10 songs on that album hit top 100. And the album, you know, charted on billboard, and yeah, it was incredible. And that kind of launched everything. Uh, unfortunately, that was February of 2019. We toured like six or eight months out of 2019, and April, April of the following year, 2020, we were about to get in the van and leave, and COVID made landfall, and the and it happened in Washington first. And our first show was Seattle. So that show got canceled, and I reached out to my agent, was like, hey, do we gotta like worry about this? You know, like what's gonna happen? He's like, Oh, don't worry, it's just that show. And then literally just dominoes started falling. Every single show, one after another, canceled, the whole freaking world shut down, as we know, and it screwed a lot of stuff up for a lot of people. You know, a lot of the the venues that we play are all ages, 500 cap venues, and 80% of those in the country either closed down or got bought out by AEG and Live Nation, and it changed the landscape drastically. But Smart Punk has been awesome. Matt Burns is my AR rep over there, and Grant is the owner, and they just you know, they believe in the things that I preach, and they know that I know the business pretty well, and they just kind of let me do what I want. They check in from time to time to see what's uh what's going on. Uh, but but as far as like you know, direction of the album or like writing or any of that, they just let me do what I want. You know, when when we put out the first self-titled record, it was a lot more radio and poppy than it than what the band has become. The Persevering Promise was a straight-up metal core band. And when we rebranded into a live in Barcelona, we started writing songs specifically for radio. When we put out our EP uh in 2022 entitled Flatline, that was starting to go back towards the direction. Now it we never went back to like full metal core, that's just not what a live in Barcelona is. But we brought the screams back, we brought the breakdowns back, we brought all the heavy stuff, and I think what we learned through the self-titled was that we were trying to make music that we thought people wanted to hear, and we weren't making music from the heart. So when we came back and did flatline, it was like we're doing the music that we want to do, and it made all the difference, you know. Like the people that were on the fence before were like, Okay, I'm fully behind this. This is we can just tell this is you. There's you're not like trying to fit a mold, you know, and that's kind of the new direction. I mean, there's I've I have an album worth of songs sitting on my hard drive that have been done for years that just hasn't been the right time to put them out. But 2026 is a new year, and I think I'm gonna start start getting those rolled out.

SPEAKER_00 40:38

Jesse, I have to say, you are the most peaceful screamer that I've ever seen.

SPEAKER_03 40:44

It's all an act.

SPEAKER_00 40:46

No, your face is not all contorted, there's not a million wrinkles, there's no veins popping out of your neck. You are just the most you just look again.

SPEAKER_03 40:54

You can't see my neck, you can't see my neck. I got the beard to cover up those veins.

SPEAKER_00 40:57

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 40:58

Okay, that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 40:59

Well, I think that you've gained a lot of perspective, like from losing some parents, losing opportunities, and then taking the skill set that your dad has given you, all that wrapped into one. And so it's giving you a perspective of what success is. And so now you're working with some artists, you've been working in this great studio. Can you tell me how has it changed your perspective seeing both sides of the business as an artist and as helping to develop artists? You know, how has it changed your perspective on the business itself overall?

Success Is Relative And Management Insight

SPEAKER_03 41:29

Well, let me back up a second to what you said about success. And the biggest thing that I learned through all this is that success is relative. Like, there is no there is no benchmark for hey, you've made it now. Like it all depends on the person and the band, you know. Like again, for us when we started, it was I just want to play with my favorite bands when they come through my city. And once we had done that, then it was all right, we want to go play a big festival in front of 5,000 people. And then we did that, and then it was all right, now we want to tour nationally and we want to sign record deals and all this stuff. And it's like, you know, the bar just keeps raising, but I have done the coolest things that like in my life and through my band and music has brought me to the craziest places, and I've done so many badass things that most people could only dream about. Like my band got a private tour of NASA. Like, I I literally have a picture with Victor, Victor Glover, who's going to space in like two weeks. I like I have a picture with him in his spacesuit, uh, with just my band members and him, you know, because music brought me there. And so success is totally relative, but my perspective has I've almost had more life experience than most people will by the time they're 80 because I've, you know, both good and bad, because I've the band has brought me to really awesome places, uh, but also because I've lost parents, and so there's been highs and lows, but I think that the perspective that I've gained through doing all of this and through loss and all of that has allowed me to be level-headed and stop wasting energy and time on things that don't matter. And my bad record deals, for example, in in the past, where having those experiences allowed me to work with the artists that I do and show them what potholes to avoid, you know. Um, and also make the connections to, you know, through my own band, it this is a two-way street. I've made connections in my band that have allowed me to streamline somebody else's career. I've also used connections that I've gained through streamlining someone else's career to use for my own band. So I think that when you're on the outside and you're only an artist, you know, and this might change at a certain level or a different music scene or whatever, but the kind of music scene that I'm in, if you're just an artist, you're always just trying to fight for attention of the people that are the are the key players. And when I started getting into the manager role of that, and through all the business that I've done for my own band, I finally kind of broke that and was able to kind of see around the curtain and gain. An audience through fellow artist managers and booking agents, etc. And that has helped me exponentially, both for my own band and for the artists that I represent. You know, I one of my good friends, her name's Melanie Miliato, uh, she actually lives in Nashville. You know, she books some of the largest bands on the planet, and I would not have that contact if it wasn't for representing artists on the management side. But yeah, I think ultimately through all the things that I've gone through in life, through music and my personal life, like I just don't have time to waste in the wrong places anymore. You know?

unknown 44:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 44:39

I don't I just want to cut through the BS and just get down to the things that matter.

Jay Franze 44:43

You mentioned having the amount of wisdom that you do, and I think that's because you've lived not only hard but fast. So you've experienced a lot of things in a short period of time.

SPEAKER_03 44:53

And I think for somebody like me that grew up in a town of 500 people and it's all just, you know, a logging community, and people are all related for one, but they also see life all through one lens. Like, you know, getting out and traveling the world in my teenage years, and I've now been everywhere in the country a dozen times, and it changes your perspective, you know. You you start to realize that like I have friends in all walks of life now, every race, every ethnicity, people from all over the world that I never would know or probably ever have you know experienced if it wasn't for music. And I think all those help me have a clear head as to what's valuable and what isn't, you know, and what and especially when it gets to you know everybody just yelling at each other on the internet.

Jay Franze 45:40

All righty, sir. Well, we did this thing here we call Unsung Heroes, where we take a moment to shine the light on somebody's work behind the scenes or somebody who may have supported you along the way. Do you have anybody you'd like to shine a little light on?

Unsung Heroes And Gratitude

SPEAKER_03 45:53

Uh well, you know, uh my wife is uh definitely, you know, number one. Like the first year that my wife and I were dating, I didn't see her for the first like I saw her six months out of the first one year. Uh, because I was just on the road traveling and doing God knows what. And she stuck it out, man. Like, we've been through hell together, but she has always supported me. I mean, she like literally from the time I was, you know, when we were in the Persevering Promise in the early days, and the first time I went out to hustle on warp tour and all that, like she stayed at home and held it down while we went on tour. Like, and when I was broke on tour, she would work in a coffee job, but you know, send me money to keep going and and to keep living the dream. And and she's been there like from then to to the tour buses and you know, the success and the radio singles and all that stuff, you know. And so uh we're coming up on I think this is year nine this year and uh of marriage, and yeah, she's still she still supports me whatever I want to do. My mother supported me from day one, you know. My dad was always uh he was the realist, you know. Like when I said I was gonna get out of high school early to play it in a band, he was like, Well, how are you gonna support your family? And I was like, I don't care, I'll figure it out. My mom always told me I could do whatever I wanted to do. She bought me my first bass guitar and uh like I started learning to play in high school band through that. So like she has always supported me from the get-go. But uh as far as like in the music scene goes, I would definitely say uh my my buddy Jimmy Hill, you know, he uh who owns that studio, you know, he uh he him and I have been doing music together now for 15, 20 years. And you know, I was there when his first daughter was born. We used to have to shut the we used to have to shut the power off upstairs in his house because his studio was in his basement and the power of the studio would trip all the breakers upstairs. So we'd shut all the breakers off and we'd go down there and mute make music all day. And his wife Mandy's amazing, and she'd have this newborn baby, and like we'd be just be down there BSing for hours, and eventually she'd open the door and be like, Can I can I turn the microwave back on now? We're like, Oh crap, she's in the dark up there, like we totally forgot. You know, and I've I've been with him through multiple studios now, and now this amazing studio amplified wax that I had a hand in building and and get the privilege to you know record out of. He's just been incredibly helpful, and I just I love the dude. I'm grateful to have been a part of his journey and and have him still be a part of mine today. Yeah, Joel Wanisek would be another one. He's uh he's a mixing engineer in Wisconsin, and uh he runs a Ultimate Recording or uh URM Unstoppable Recording Machine and Nail the Mix. Joel's been amazing to me too. You know, he he did the mixing on my band's last uh material, and he also does mixing on Scarlet O'Hara, which is the the band that I manage. And uh yeah, he's just been a cool, cool dude and a good friend. And on that note, have a good night.

Jay Franze 48:53

Thanks for listening to the Jay Franzi show. Make sure you visit us at JFranzi.com. Follow, connect, and say hello.