About this Playlist
Learn more about mixtape 42 here
Spotlight on John Moran
The music business is weird – it’s populated by an ever shifting cast of humans trying their hand at “making” it – particularly in LA. There’s hopefuls and wannabes, nepo kids and rare beauties, all taking their shot against the odds – knowing that the vast majority will fail, but believing they’re different.
And while the stories of the few that do succeed are inevitably unique – there does seem to be an underlying trait that they all share :
A work ethic.
I wrote about this recently in respect to an artist just starting out – but it is so much more obvious when you chat with someone like John who’s been in the trenches for a while now.
I love how he’s always iterating, always learning and developing, trying on different hats, different projects, and all the while growing as an artist and producer. I love his current mixtapes project – it’s so aligned with what we are doing here at musicto – bringing context to tracks and creating a space for deeper connections with artists and their music.
I also loved his answers to our spotlight questions:
Tell us about your mixtapes project, what inspired it, what are your hopes for it?
We used to make each other mixtapes – no more than 20 songs or 80 minutes of music. We would spend hours perfecting the order and selection of songs to make the perfect playlist for the right person. I used to love that, the process of making a compilation for someone you care about, getting out the sharpies and writing on the plastic case “songs you should love.” I’ve collected so many mixtapes over the years, CDs friends have burned for me, tapes that my older brothers used to record from the radio, and I miss that aspect of music sharing, that idea of sharing powerful feelings and moments with somebody.
I started making these mixtapes to emulate those mixtapes I used to make for my friends back in the day. And they’re not aimed at anyone in particular, just a set of songs I think are really good, worth hearing and checking out. Discovering new music is hard, and I’m trying to make it easy for everyone. Each one is 20 songs (or 80 minutes), just like an old CD or cassette, and can’t be any longer. I’m blending hidden gems, classics, and unexpected discoveries. I see it as a way to introduce people to music they might not encounter otherwise, and also as a way for listeners to get a sense of who I am as a producer, songwriter, and curator.
I’m also making these as a response to the 800 song playlists I keep getting sent online. I ask people for music recommendations and they send me playlists that are a week long. Those might be good to soundtrack a whole season of your life, if that’s the only thing you listen to, but they feel like picking through the bins at Goodwill. There may be something for me in there, sure, but it’s going to take a lot of work to find it. On the other hand, these short playlists are precious, and each song here matters. Finding something you love shouldn’t be so hard here.
My hope is that these mixtapes become a discovery tool for friends, family, and strangers alike. I get excited when someone finds a song they love on these playlists. That’s when it stops being my song and becomes ours – and then it’s something we can share with each other.
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What are your upcoming plans and how can people support you?
Right now, I’m finishing up the Sad Disco project, which blends upbeat dance grooves with darker, introspective lyrics. It’s been a hard project because it’s a maximalist genre with a lot of moving parts to fit together, and there’s no band – it’s all me. I’ve recorded an album and scrapped it twice, but what I have now is a set of 5 songs I’m really excited about, and I’m working every day to wrap them up.
In the meantime I’ve started posting demos on Patreon, so I can share pieces of projects I’ve put on the back burner while I’m working on Sad Disco. That includes some unheard collaborations with artists, some demos that don’t fit onto this new project, and some fun behind the scenes pieces.
The best way people can support me is by engaging with my work—listening to the mixtapes, streaming the singles, listening to the demos on patreon, and sharing them with others. Signing up for my mailing list is a huge help too. It’s a more personal way for me to stay connected and share music, stories, unreleased tracks, and updates.
Name one song, or album, other than your own, that you would recommend to listeners—why?
I’ve been listening to an album a day for the past month (part of a healthy diet), and taking notes on what I’ve learned from each one. It’s been helpful for me to understand my own approach to music, what I like and what I don’t, and what I can bring into my own work.
The last album that really inspired me was the first Gorillaz album (Self-Titled, 2001). Where I think this album really shines is in its risk-taking. Consider that it came out in 2001, and it somehow sounds like nothing else that came out that year. It really inspired me to get weirder, to take more risks in my own music, and to push the edges of what I am comfortable with. It’s so strange, and its strangeness is what makes it so interesting and cool as a piece of music.
What are you curious about at the moment? Why?
I’ve been excited about the idea of adapting the sad disco project to a live show. I’ve avoided live performances for a while, but I have started playing live sets again with a sampler, treating the performances less like they need to be perfect and polished, and more like a standup comic workshopping new material. I can bring productions out with me that are close to finished, and gauge an audience’s reaction to the music. It helps me prioritize songs that perform well and revisit the songs that don’t. I’ve been wrestling with the ins and outs of this type of production, especially since the sampler I use, the Elektron Digitakt I, is not a tool that was designed to be a live tool. It’s a piece that brings in its own set of challenges and a broad set of limitations, and those can be fun to wrestle with.
If you had $2,500 to spend on music marketing, where would you spend it and why?
Realistically, I’d split it between content creation and ad spend for that content. First, I’d invest in music videos that can be chopped up and repurposed across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts. I would test which content and music performs best with the limited audiences it reaches organically, and run ads to promote the most successful content. I’ve had the most luck reaching audiences by running ads, and the least with organic content. Over the course of several hundred videos and posts, I have had nothing take off organically without ad-spend.
My ideal, though, would be to spend all of that money making visual art that I am passionate about, with talented directors and videographers, ideally on music videos for the Sad Disco project. I’ve been working on a music video concept for a song called “Pieces,” where every shot is a different version of a shattered reality. As a creator, I can cover the development of the music, but life is too short to also learn to be a great video producer, video editor, color grader, social media influencer, photographer, web designer, etc. I’d love to work with and hire the most talented people in those fields to collaborate with.
If you could summon one musician back from the dead to collaborate with, who would it be? Why? What do you think you would create?
I want to say Prince, but I think I would need to defer to him across the whole process, and it would mostly be a learning experience for me. Working with Prince, I’d just want to watch Prince work. I think my ideal might be to pull musicians to work on my music. I would love to hear Tony Allen play drums on a couple of my songs, or Chic’s Bernard Edwards on bass for Sad Disco, Quincy Jones arranging strings for the project. I pull a lot of inspiration from them, and spend so much time emulating the things I think make those players great.
What is a piece of music that has changed you?
For my 5th birthday, my brother made me a mixtape of a bunch of classic rock songs, new songs that just came out, clips from The Simpsons, and anything else he felt like I should know and hear. It’s probably the best set of songs I’ve ever heard. It was incredibly influential in my musical tastes, and probably in how much I ended up wanting to pursue music. Whenever I hear music from that tape I’m transported back to a place I don’t quite remember, but the feeling continues. That playlist is like a time capsule that brings me back to feelings I haven’t had in ages. It’s part of why I’ve been so excited about making this mixtape series – if I can recreate even a small percentage of the feeling that mixtape gave me for somebody else, I’ll be pretty happy.
What do you think of Nick Cave’s response to an AI-generated track “in the style of Nick Cave”?
I may be more suspicious of the role that AI will ultimately play in creation (or the replacement of creators) than he is. He points out that AI cannot feel, and that suffering is a necessary pre-requisite to writing a good song, so AI, with its lack of experience in the field, will never be able to create an authentic feeling of humanity in its creations. It will always be replicating that feeling.
I would argue that the sheer amount of data on human suffering that is being fed into the algorithms could enable breakthroughs. As he said in his piece, these LLMs are still in their infancy, something that is clearly apparent to me in the fact that many of the lines from the AI song written here are lines that I have seen before when I have gone searching for song ideas on different AI apps. AI loves to talk about ‘sirens’ and other mythological figures in ways that are very much out of line with how we talk about many familiar concepts today. They feel unoriginal, and lame.
With enough data, could an AI create a realistic and new idea that feels different from anything else? I’m not sure yet, but I do think of how young artists often imitate the artists they love until they are able to step out from behind their influences. As I write this, I’m listening to Olivia Rodrigo’s “good 4 u” and Paramore’s “Misery Business,” and the influence is clear there, even in those two distinctly different songs. AI may still be behind its influences, but it also is creating music that, in his words, sucks. When, or if, that will change, is still to be seen.
How do you feel about the future? Optimistic? Pessimistic? Why?
The music industry is in a strange place right now—streaming platforms have created an unsustainable record industry for all but the top 1% of the top 1% of artists on the platform, and touring profits are dwindling as expenses and fees eat into revenue. Artists need to be more entrepreneurial than ever just to get by, to pay rent, to eat. Year over year, I see artists struggle more just to get by as they are cut out of more forms of income and cut into new and higher expenses. I think necessity is a powerful motivator for innovation, but those who seem most able to innovate are often the ones who have the means to do so.
The music industry, with all of those means, is surprisingly risk-averse and responsive to changes rather than forward-thinking and looking to create change. It’s essentially an investment industry that invests in trends and follows the decisions of major tech companies and algorithms. I don’t see any innovation coming from the industry itself to solve the problems artists face, or to find new ways to bring music into the lives of consumers. I think the industry is approaching another turning point, but what comes next, good or bad, is still to be seen. These changes are usually defined by new technology, and right now everyone is still dealing with the very potent drug of short form social media tech.
But I also think that gives independent artists unprecedented freedom. We can build ecosystems around our work, connect directly with fans, and experiment with new formats (like my mixtapes or infinite music concepts). There’s uncertainty, but there’s also a lot of room for innovation.
If you were granted a short audience with the omnipotent being and could play them one track of yours so that they would know who you are (in that moment), what track would that be?
Right now, I’m most excited about a song called “Happy For Once,” an unreleased track off the Sad Disco Project. It’s a combination of influences I love but it doesn’t quite sound like anything I’ve heard before, and that is exciting to me. For releases, I’d play “Lonely One Last Time” from the same project. It captures a lot of what I’m trying to do as an artist, but mostly, it’s a really fun song. I love the string arrangements on it, and the groove is pretty irresistible.
John Moran
John Moran is a Los Angeles based music producer and songwriter. He began his career as an indie-pop musician, playing in the Northeast US before making the full-time transition to music production. He has worked with major artists, Grammy winners, and up and comers alike. His solo project, jawnmo, is an exploration of indie rock, with upcoming tracks that sound like classic dance & disco records.
Andrew note:
John and I met at The Rattle, a “disruptive music incubator” that had spaces in London and Los Angeles. It was a great idea – bring a bunch of creative people together – put them in the same room – create a strong supportive environment, foster community, throw some money at promising connections, stand back and see what happens. The LA space had its opening party two weeks before Covid shut the world down. The Rattle never really recovered, which was a shame ‘cos it could have been really, really cool 🙂
We actually featured John on the site back during his Mad Mad Mad artist project – he made a pretty awesome playlist called Dead End Friends – check it out here.
