Q: Can you tell us a bit about yourself and how your childhood impacted your musical direction?
A: I’m originally from New Hope, Pennsylvania, an artsy town an hour north of Philadelphia, 2 hours from NYC. I was always musically inclined as a kid, tap dancing growing up, was in musicals since elementary school, picked up playing bass when I was about 10 years old, and played in a jam rock band called Urban Funk Monkeys when I was around 14. Writing and playing music has always been in the background of my life, especially while I went to school for acting and musical theater. But then a few years after graduating, I became very impassioned to write more original music and put it out there. So I worked with my friend Jared Bardugone on The Jared Project, and put out several releases under my name Jared Mancuso.
Q: Can you describe the musical style of Esso in three words?
A: Holy crap this is a hard one….I’ll pick Nostalgic, Powerful, Melodic
Q: How do you stay connected with your fans, and what role do they play in shaping your musical journey?
A: I’ve been getting more involved in socials, trying to stay on top of questions, comments, feedback, all of that. I think that shifting the rebrand from Jared Mancuso to Esso has been a but of a challenge because I’m not sure some fans know it’s me haha. But it’s me!
Q: You have just released your new album, ‘Everything You Ever Wanted’. Is there a story behind it?
A: It drops May 24th of this year, and I’m so excited about it. With my solo projects under Jared Mancuso, I really went into a riff-heavy rock in the style of Jack White, Royal Blood, Queens of the Stone Age, which has always been a blast to write and play. In 2021 I put out a single called ‘Go On’ and it was much more heavily influenced by the pop/alt rock stylings I’ve also been attracted to all these years, Weezer, Everclear, the 90s icons and some early 00’s vibes. People really seemed to like it a lot, but I felt a little odd suddenly shifting my whole sound. So I jumped into a full rebrand and wrote an album really saluting and hoping to bring a new wave of excitement to that genre of rock. It took me about 2 years to piece together the songs, with topics ranging from the fear of the future, the frustrations of being a musician, heartbreak, missing yesterday, and a lot in between.
Q: What is your favorite track from the album and why?
A: My favorite track (although this is hard to pick) is Beverly. I had the idea several years ago, I had a melody, I knew the hook in the chorus was “Beverly…da da da” but was having the hardest time making it how I wanted it to be. It was always inspired by Stephen King’s IT novel, with the idea being it’s sung by Ben Hanscom to Beverly Marsh. Musically I was very much influenced by mixing an old school mid-century rock sound to a more modern rock. Weezer’s song Suzanne comes to mind. When I finally managed to shape the song in a way that felt authentic, has a little bit of cheese, and filled out the harmonies, I was just thrilled. I just love how it all turned out.
Q: Can you walk us through the creative process of producing the album, “Everything You Ever Wanted”?
A: For this album I did an overhaul of the equipment in my home studio. I was hellbent on capturing the best sound I could for these songs I felt so strongly about, and didn’t want to be limited by things out of my creative control. But before I could commit to that, I had to really flesh these songs out. I set my amp up, plugged in my Big Muff pedal, opened up the voice memos app on my phone, and just caught every idea, mistake, concept, melody, anything I could think of onto the a memo. Then over the next two years I walked away from the material, would come back, add a new voice memo, so on, until I had about 13 songs I felt good about. Then I starting making new demos where I took all of these floating parts I had made, and sewed them together into singular songs, so the end result was all of the instrumentation, the verse-chorus-bridge layouts of each song, and melodies with some scattered lyrics here and there. The next step was journaling so I could flesh out lyrics. That’s always the longest process for me because I’m incredibly self-conscious about sounding dumb haha. But eventually I just kind of let go on it, and decided that if a lyric is a little dumb, that’s ok. Then I finished tracking the album and sent it off to be mixed and mastered. It’s been an incredibly long journey to get this album together, but I’m so happy with the results and seriously so stoked to share it all.
Q: What has been the most memorable concert or performance for Esso so far?
A: Sadly, I’m still new to the scene, so I haven’t gotten onto a stage just yet. HOWEVER, there are some on the burner, and I have the online album Listening Party coming up on May 17th!
Q: Reflecting on your body of work, each song holding its unique significance, could you share a particular track that stands out to you personally? What makes that specific tune special, and why does it hold a place of pride in your musical journey?
A: There’s a song I did with The Jared Project called All Over You that I absolutely had a blast putting together. At the time, I was living in NYC and I didn’t have a huge understanding yet for recording on my computer (always did things on solid state recorders). So I remember recording the guitar parts direct in my apartment, recording bass as well, then rolling into Astoria Soundworks, setting up two microphones over a drum set and blasting out the drum part. I worked with Jared Bardugone on the melody and he wrote the lyrics. Then I compressed the hell out of the recording and I’ve been in love ever since haha. It’s on our debut album The Battle Between Love and Fear. It’s incredibly fun to play live, and I even had an opportunity to get it onto t it on my live album Jared Mancuso Live at John & Peters. I think it stands out so much to me because it was my first big heavy hitting song where I just blasted it out, crash coursed myself with Logic, and it re-launched a whole new wave of writing original music at the time.
Q: Exploring the diverse creative processes within the music industry is always fascinating. Could you provide insight into Esso’s unique approach to crafting music? From the initial spark of an idea to the finished song, how do you navigate the creative journey and bring its musical concepts to life?
A: Well I always write the music first, lyrics last. That’s been my process since as long as I can remember. As a music listener, I always just connected with a musical melody, or cool guitar line, or a beat, first. Some of my favorite songs, if you asked me to sing it to you right now, I’d probably not know half the lyrics haha. Not that lyrics aren’t important, because they are! When I write them, I have to journal. I used to just try to write it as poetry right out the gate, and it just had such limited success. So when I’d be writing a song, let’s take ’Starting Over’ as an example, I’d play the chorus and sing a melody, “da da da da…starting overrrr….da da da da four leaf clover.” I knew that I didn’t like the lyric “four leaf clover” so I would go to my journal and write at the top of the page “Starting Over” and then I break that open. What do I mean by those words? So it goes on and I land on the idea that, when dating someone for a long time, when you go through a breakup, it’s scary because it feels like you’re starting over. Everything in the life you’ve become familiar with is about to change. BUT what about someone has been single for so long? Meeting someone amazing can feel scary because everything in the life you’ve become familiar with is about to change. And boom, I can start mining that journal entry for lyrics because I have a more fleshed out story to tell.
Q: As we wrap up our conversation, looking ahead, what aspirations or dreams do you have for Esso, and what message would you like to share with your fans as they continue to accompany you on this musical journey?
A: I hope to speak to people of all ages, in a non-political way, about (what I think are) universal feelings that we don’t always talk about. Missing someone. Missing out on what’s in front of us. Worrying about tomorrow. Social media…fun or terrifying? Are we individuals or a heard or somewhere in between? Are our best days behind us? I think about all of these things all the time, and I think many other people do as well. So I hope that I can bring some sense of community while getting a song stuck in your head.
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