Actor and musician Jack O’Neill is branching out on his own. After years of performing music as part of his pop-rock band, Jackopierce, O’Neill is putting out his second album as a solo artist—and his first as a solo artist in over 20 years—North Star this coming summer. This website builder for musicians is extremely user friendly. Today, O’Neill is dropping his first single off the album, “Weight of the World,” a shimmering pop-rock piece with sharp hooks and poignant lyrics that promises us a knockout of a full album.
Recently, we sat down with O’Neill to talk about his new song, his new album, his double life as a musician and actor, and what it’s like to be a solo artist after so many years of focusing on a band. Check out the full interview below.
So we are here first and foremost to talk about your new single “Weight of the World,” which is coming out on February 23. Can you tell us a little bit about this song and how it came about?
I live in New York City. I’m an actor. I was taking an acting class, and one day, the instructor said, “Hey, I want you to you all to write scenes.” And I thought, “Man, I, I’ve never tried to write a scene for anything.” So, for the exercise, I started to write the scene about two people in a relationship, and it involved a bunch of different things. And I realized how difficult it was to write any kind of acting piece, whether it’s a play or a short scene, and was really humbled by the experience.
But it turned into this song. And what the song is really about is how you have the beginning moment in any kind of relationship, you remember that first moment, and then you can remember the very last moment, and everything in the middle gets forgotten.
And I put that in the context of living in New York City for so long. There are places that were my favorite bar to go to, and one day you realize that they they tore the whole block down. This is a true story; they tore the whole block down and replaced it with a massive building. And there’s like a Chase Bank where your favorite bar used to be. You can walk down the block and you have a really hard time picturing as it used to be, and what all those memories were. So, “The Weight of the World” was really about trying to live in the moment as much as possible. It’s not the weight of the world, but it can feel like it.
That’s actually really interesting. And then you have the fourth coming out of North Star, this is the first single off of it. That album is said to be united around a single theme. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
I didn’t start off writing with a theme in mind. But I kept coming back to this sense of, the older I get, the closer I get to all the places that I came from, or all the places that I’d been before. I grew up an army brat. My father was in the army, and not by choice. He got drafted into the army and was like, “I don’t have a college degree or anything” and he just made a career of it.
So we bounced around a lot when I was growing up and I never really felt rooted to any one place. I never felt like I had a hometown. I think we moved something like 22 times by the time I was done with high school, something like that, something crazy. So, as I get older, I find myself reconnecting with that idea of all those places that I came from built the whole that I am now. And it’s really this idea that I grew up feeling like a little bit of an outsider. (I’d) move to a new place, (I’d) have to start all over making friends. And that outsider element stayed with me even into my adulthood.
And then I realized, I think we all feel that way. I think the thing about the human condition is that we’re all, for whatever reasons, looking to make connections. And, for me, my whole life has just been about trying to connect with people somehow. Despite all the evidence, I think there are a lot of really good people in the world. I’m trying to find them, and hopefully I’m doing that by connecting with some universal stories.
You’ve traditionally performed as part of your band, Jackopierce. Yeah. What’s been different about making music as a solo artist?
The genesis of this solo release (is) I recorded a solo album 20 years ago, and I just sold hard copies at shows, and it was super indie. And it ended up getting on all the streaming platforms by 2010, or whenever, and I really never knew how that happened. I never really bothered to investigate how that happened. I, in a weird way, was—I don’t want to say ignoring it—but looking at it as like, “Oh, that’s something I did and whatever.” And (I) realized that it’s living forever on streaming platforms.
So my idea was to go back in the studio and recut the whole thing and see what it was like, in this phase of my life, to revisit all those songs. I rerecorded two of those songs. And I was working with my really good friend and producer, J. Michael Smith, and I was like, “Well, I have all these new songs that I’ve been writing, why don’t we look at some of those?” So then the idea of revisiting an entire album went out the window as we moved on to new stuff.
And I think the difference now, as far as writing for this versus writing for my band, is that, through COVID, I started playing live streams because I couldn’t go out and tour, and I started revisiting all those songs on my own, and I started writing a whole lot more. I really tapped back into the writer inside and started creating all these new songs. And I felt like they were really good, but I didn’t just want to play them in my bedroom. I wanted to get them out into the world.
And it came from a really surprising place, versus “Okay, I’m in this band, we’re going to make a record. Let’s focus on writing some stuff for this record. And let’s think about what the people that like our music would want to hear.” Instead, this was just, “I’m just going to experiment with where I’m at right now and how I feel right now.” I will say, a lot of it is I got sober about five and a half years ago, and a lot of this is tied into getting sober, being in recovery, reconnecting with (my) original self.
You’ve made music but you’re also an actor. Is there one of those two that you prefer?
It’s interesting, it was only when I got sober that I would tell people that I was an artist of any kind. Before that, I would hem and haw on the answer. I feel more comfortable as an actor. I feel like I’m not the greatest guitar player; I would not be the guy to recommend as the guitar player. But if you want to hang out after the show, I’m totally game. So I was always a little uncomfortable to say I was a musician, because I didn’t feel like I had really great guitar chops. I just happened to write with a guitar because I kind of know how to play it. If I knew how to play the piano, I guess I’d probably be making piano music.
I feel more comfortable as an actor. But I also feel like they’re, for me, closely entwined in terms of, if you sit down to write a song, you should have the same intent that an actor has when they prepare a role, in the sense that they know who the character is, what the character is saying, why it’s saying what it’s saying. It created a life within it. And that was my approach, in this, to just be clear about what I’m really saying in terms of writing a song. So not only that, but I think of myself more as a writer than a musician.
And you have a solo acoustic show coming up on the day of the single’s release in New York. Have you been doing a lot of solo shows for this so far? Is this going to be your first?
No, I did a couple of shows at Rockwood Music Hall in New York City in the fall. But I don’t do a whole lot of solo shows. I’m hoping that’ll change; I’m going to try to make that change. But I’m pretty excited; it’s a lot of fun. I just realized how much fun I have playing. Performing live is definitely still really intimidating, in a beautiful way, but I’m looking forward to it. And my goal with that would be to play my hometown in New York on a more regular basis, and then see if I can expand out of New York. Obviously, that would be based on a number of factors, like people wanting to hear me in Chicago or whatever it might be.
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