Catching up with musician Jonny Glenn
He has played at venues such as Royale, Brighton Music Hall, the Red Room Cafe 939, and House of Blues
The last time we checked in with up and coming musician Jonny Glenn was March 2016. Now, a year later, he’s made big strides to becoming a recognized name in the music world.
Photo by Joseph Terry.
Glenn’s music used to be just him and a guitar. Now, he has a band that gives his music a fuller sound. There are six musicians in addition to Glenn.
“The trumpet… provides an element you wouldn’t expect; it really fills out the sound,” Glenn said. “At the same time, it’s still mainstream and gets people dancing. It’s almost like revisiting a different era, like jazz used to be huge before our time.”
Glenn actually met the trumpet player in an Uber X. They got to talking, and the trumpet player put together the band, except for a guitarist Glenn already knew, Matt Migliorino.
Glenn says he’s definitely changed since last year: “I’m more in touch with what I want in life. I’m against wasting time, and there’s no messing around with me- I’m gonna do what I want to do.”
He has devoted “every waking moment of [his] life” on how to develop his social media, and how to get his brand going better than it already was. He says he’s always emailing, and constantly trying to get gigs.
Photo by Joseph Terry.
“I’ve gotten a lot of comments like, ‘You’re really not normal. What’s wrong with you?’, to which I respond, I don’t care, I’m going to do what I find value in. Did you think Beyonce was normal before she got big? She didn’t go to TITS [Tavern in the Square] every Thursday.”
Glenn doesn’t care what people think. “I don’t go out very much. I’m always working on something music related.”
Photo by Savannah Clarke.
Glenn’s playing and performing experience has evolved quite a lot over the past year. He’s currently playing one or two gigs a week, and has played at venues such as Royale, Brighton Music Hall, the Red Room Cafe 939, and House of Blues, which he’s played at eight times. While not on the same stage, Glenn has played the same night as Echo and the Bunnymen, Young the Giant, Passenger, Cole Swindell, and Alter Bridge.
“As far as me selling tickets and seeing people come out, Brighton Music Hall was the biggest deal,” said Glenn.
Photo by Savannah Clarke.
“The concept was there, but not the production,” Glenn says, regarding the songs he’d written when we first met with him in February 2016. Since then he’s gotten together with a producer at Berklee College of Music, Jason Strong.
The music has always been good, but now the full vision can be heard.
“I’m not a producer, you know?” Glenn said. “But now the quality is there. Now it can get out the way I hear it.”
Networking with the right people, and hooking up with the best student producers in Berklee, has enabled Glenn’s vision for the sound to be heard by others. His new music is groundbreaking in comparison to the old.
Photo by Savannah Clarke.
“The feedback that we’ve gotten from people has been amazing, and that really feeds [the music], too,” Glenn said. “Last spring [2016] I was still rebranding myself. I had been in bands, but they weren’t working as I had anticipated. But I really found my niche musically, and I think that really helped me discover myself, too.”
That combination has really stepped up the focus “twentyfold” from where it was. Glenn has always concentrated on his music, but he feels his artistic direction is more purposeful.
Glenn recently cowrote two songs, “Fireproof” and “Divine Again”, that were released on March 7, 2017.
Compared to a year ago, Glenn said he’s “made mistakes, learned, and am now moving forward faster than [he] ever thought possible.”
Featured Image by Joseph Terru.