Jonathan Brown To Release Animated Album

New Orleans-based hip-hop/slam poet, musician, and digital creator Jonathan Brown has been working on a multi-media music project, You Are The Truth. Let Your Eyes Adjust, set to release this spring.

The former high school teacher hit the road as a performer in 2015, performing over 150 shows per year up until the pandemic. His bio touts being a rapper “softer than a cinnamon roll,” but also as a person who simply exists and has as much as anyone else to share, add, and contribute. “We all have the capacity to ease the world’s suffering in some way,” says Brown.

This album intends to do so in a refreshing and unique way, at least for those still in the DIY and indie circuits. You Are The Truth. Let Your Eyes Adjust has accompanying visuals for each track in the form of stop-motion animated lyric videos. The project began as a means of steadying Brown through the uncertainty of the pandemic, inspired by seeing the punk band Something and the Whatevers perform in Topeka, Kansas with the aid of a projector.

“I was completely blown away. The projector helped me to understand every word, which at a punk show is rare. That’s when the spark first started,” says Brown. “The process itself became the reason, if that makes sense. I didn’t know what was going on in the world, but I knew what was going on with these Scrabble pieces. It gave me stability.”

Before the pandemic, Brown says that he was “always a dude with a sampler,” a common sight in the indie rap scene. Utilizing a projector to show painstakingly-crafted lyric videos for the audience to follow along during his set would help set him apart. However, that also means a lot more gear to both purchase and transport. It’s also affected the amount of communication required with the venues and show hosts, as Brown says it’s not as simple as “pass me the aux” anymore. The tech set up itself requires about an hour.

“While performing this album, I feel like I’m in a two-man band, and the other guy is killing it. The other guy is the projector. I notice most of the audience’s eyes are drawn more towards the words on the screen and are less on me than they used to be. And that honestly feels kind of liberating,” says Brown. “It takes some of the pressure off. So far, I’ve done two tours with the new projector set, and the audiences have really gravitated to the art. In part, because it helps them catch every word of every song. It feels more forthcoming. Nothing goes over their heads, and I really love that heightened sense of connection.”

For the process of making the music itself, Brown collaborated with Daniel Brown for extensive exploration into sound design and sampling. Brown explains that they’d tweak and warp sounds until “a piano sound[ed] like a waterfall” or “a toilet brush hitting the side of a desk sound[ed] like a kick drum.” Filthy Broke Recordings did the final mastering of the tracks.

Illustrating the record himself took about two years of work—at most spending four hours within a single day on it. More than time, the album required a lot of money to make. Brown has an Indiegogo preorder set up to help recoup the involved costs.

The album will hit all streaming platforms upon release and on a creamsicle swirl orange and yellow vinyl, available for pre-order now. All pre-ordered merch and vinyls will be shipped before the album is avaialble for streaming.

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