Jim Byron

Hi, my name is Jameson Byron and I am 22 years old. I have been writing songs since age 11, in sixth grade when I rounded up my friends at school to start an imaginary band, myself not ever having played a guitar, my best friend, a 10-year-old Max Josephson being a young prodigy on piano, and a lot of dreams of musician-hood planted in my imagination from growing up listening to old 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s songs on the radio in the car, and with my dad.

When I was fourteen, I joined my first real band: my friends Cliff and Jason told me they were starting a band. Cliff had read some lyrics I wrote down, and told me they were good, so I bought some Green Day records and a Squier Strat guitar, and started writing songs; I wrote one or two song lyrics every day for some period of time. At age 16, my aunt and uncle with whom I lived forbade me from being in a band, leaving me totally devasted. I went into an apathetic depression for the remainder of my highschool residence, only write a handful of songs, but working hard, as best as I could, to become one of the greatest songwriters to ever song write.

At age 17 it was 2006 I managed to pull a band together to play songs I had been writing, now heavily influenced by the Bright Eyes albums that Cliff had given me telling me Conor Oberst was the best songwriter alive. My band was called In Eclipse. It was kind of punk, kind of emo, kind of hardcore, kind of jazzy, kind of spoken word, totally ROCK. We never played any shows, but we did record two songs at our young friend Jeff Wright's home studio. You can hear those demos here: www.myspace.com/ineclipsemusic.

At age 18 I had gotten kicked out of my house, and accepted into University of California, Santa Barbara. I didn't really care about going to college, but having lived a sheltered existence, it seemed the only opportunity I had to avoid getting a job, and it seemed mandatory for me to do. At UCSB I joined and quit a band called Black Velvet Sun, in which Max Josephson played piano with Analise on vocals and guitar and myself on bass, and continued directing my energy towards as poetical and good an existence as I possibly could, writing songs and playing shows here and there, just trying to create around me a beautiful universe of songs and artisans.

I dropped out of college after my fourth year, hyped up on Bob Dylan records, and thats about when I really became a song writer. I have an 80 year old friend who is a professor at UCSB, was briefly the poet laureate of Santa Barbara, and who shares with me an appreciate for Conor Oberst and Daniel Johnston. Now I live in Oakland, spending most of my time reading, writing, and recording demos. On Fridays I go to an open mic aired on the radio, hosted by the Common Threads Collective, and an open mic in Berkeley on tuesday at an Irish Pub called The Starry Plough.

I've written about 100 to 200 songs, and probably about 1000 pages of poesis since this story began, back in sixth grade, 1999.

All I want, is to make beautiful sounding records that inspire people to think for themselves, to love life, and to be kind unto themselves and one-another.

There are some people who wonder if I'm in it for the fame and money, and it's just not so.

If I had a million dollars, I'd pay my college loans, get myself a pair of good boots, give a bunch of it to my aunt and uncle who kicked me out, so they don't have to work until they die, and I'd probably buy a bunch of nice little things for people. To me, money is something that should be shared and used to take care of people who need to be taken care of, not for establishing oneself as some bullshit higher class of society.

If I had a billion dollars, I'd build a recording studio of my own and invent a bunch of crazy instruments on which to play music that has never been heard before. I'm like a mad scientist for sound. I'd buy a bunch of little moleskin notebooks to leave at City Lights Book Store, for people to pick up for free, so that they might write their own great songs and poems.

All I really need, is a little help, to get the ball rolling.