In Conversation with Jake Tavill

By Bethany Mikrut

New York City-based musician, artist, and producer Jake Tavill is set to release his upcoming album Walk With Me on November 13th. Walk With Me is soon to be a staple of Jake's indie soul-infused discography that discusses love, heartbreak, desire, and hope. In addition to releasing music, he is also the founder and CEO of Indigo Soul NYC and the accompanying The Color Indigo Records, which is a Brooklyn-based studio, media, and entertainment company. He had the opportunity to talk with Jake ahead of his project release on all things music and Walk With Me.

What inspired you to start pursuing music as a career?

I started playing music when I was like six. I had family friends called the Callans, and they had a basement garage band that they would play in, and we were always over there before I even could play music. I was up there kind of trying to sing along and play with them. One day my mom asked me if I wanted to learn to play keys so that I could actually play with them. I said yes and started taking keyboard lessons with classical piano when I was six. Then I started contemporary piano and keyboard lessons when I was nine, as well as vocal lessons. I started songwriting then too, and the rest is history. It is kind of something that came a bit naturally to me as a way to express myself. I always loved doing it.

What is like one larger message that you want fans to take away with your upcoming project Walk With Me?

This album is a lot about getting through a really tumultuous relationship that you can't really see through. You know the storm that is the relationship, and it's also one of the songs, "Cloudy." I think one of the things I want people to step away with is that you're not alone in this. We all go through stuff like this. It gets better. That's kind of a big aspect of it: you don't deserve to be treated badly in a relationship, and you deserve to be happy and have positive things in your life.

Do you have any visual or artistic influences that influence the project?

Like visual art, artistic side of things that, yeah, none in particular, though. I will say I'm very inspired by, like, abstract expressionism and abstract impressionism a lot. I come from an artistic family. My mom is a ceramic sculptural artist; my brother's also a sculpture artist and a furniture designer. So I come a lot from that kind of realm of things and love art. It does inspire me a lot. I wouldn't say this project has any particular specific influences, but a big artist that I like a lot is Rothko. I'm a big fan of Piet Mondrian as well. I'd say that I'd say those two kind of represent this project.

Would you say that there's like a song off the project that represents you as a human, not just as like a musician?

They all represent me as a human because they're all very authentic to me. That's one thing that's super important to me in my music: that it always comes from my truth and, you know, it's not me kind of performing in some way. It's all very much who I am and stuff I'm working through, and my thoughts and my feelings that I stand behind. But that being said, I would say I "better" is a good option. It's about wanting to constantly improve yourself and get better, especially after going through something where you didn't feel like your best self. I would say that it represents me the most.

If you faced any problems as a smaller musician, how have you ever come through that?

I haven't had any, like really big problems necessarily. You have to know what's happening in the industry, know the best way to reach your fans, know the best way to make sure all your ducks are in a row, are working with those on the admin side, and making sure everything's being collected properly. I think the biggest obstacle for a lot of musicians and artists in this industry is just kind of managing all of that. The best way to do that is to just talk to people and learn from them. I went to school for the industry at NYU Clive Davis, and that taught me a lot, but the biggest obstacle is knowledge, and that's not a big obstacle. It's all out there. U ou just kind of have to go after it.

Is there any career goal or skill that you want to develop in the next few years?

A big goal of mine is to reach the most people I can with my music in the most genuine way. I don't need any awards or anything like that, but I would really like to create more direct-to-fan engagement. I would really like to help develop music scenes here in New York, more specifically around specific genres and my style of music. I think people are starving for that a little bit more, and I would love to get that going a bit, and that's something I'm doing a bit of right now. We're developing the label side of Indigo Soul NYC as its own kind of thing with the Color Indigo Records and more to come on that side. So we're looking forward to kind of getting that going, supporting more artists and creating more community here in New York.

What is one piece of advice that you wish your younger self had before you were starting professionally in the industry?

I would say one piece of advice I wish I had given my younger self would have been to burn yourself out. I've been doing this for a long time, and in my early days I had a lot of energy. I really was pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing, and I did for a long time, and it eventually did burn me out. It took a second for me to want to release music again, focus on that again, and have the energy to push myself as an artist again. That's something that nobody really wants to face in any industry, and not even in an industry of just personal hobbies and pursuits. I wish that my younger self had known to kind of take it a little easy and really be a little bit more sustainable with that, so that it didn't get that way.