Center of Attention

Expressing Themselves by Chad Bonham

Don’t expect new band Jackson Waters to be selected as the poster boys for a stay-in-school campaign anytime soon. It’s not that the five-piece rock act has anything against education, more specifically of the higher variety, but you certainly won’t find lead singer David Leonard and company pining for the old days back in the classroom. “We just wanted to play as much as we could, and we pretty much didn’t like school,” David admits. “It was either study or go play. I think that’s what kept us sane, just the fact that we knew school wasn’t it. I know that’s not what educational people would want me to say, but for the most part, school was very stressful for us, and music was our escape.”

Leonard, along with guitar player Toby Friesen and drummer Ryan Hawk, formed the band while attending John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Ark. Local bass player Brian Meek eventually joined the group as well as guitar player Jesse LaFave, who hails from a small town north of Oklahoma City.

And while each member independently agrees that music was something they were born to do, Leonard says that his journey to college was ultimately about denying his personal desires for a life as a youth pastor.

But one night in his car, a conversation with God turned him back to the original vision for his life.

“I was just praying, ‘If this is what You want me to do, let me know,’” he remembers. “I had already prepared myself to give up all of that stuff. But I just couldn’t get away from it, and now I’m here.”

Bringing It Together With personal histories as eclectic as their tastes in music, the boys of Jackson Waters have some stories to tell. Friesen, for instance, was born in Kobe, Japan, to missionary parents and lived there until he moved to Newton, Kan., at age 13. Hawk played in a popular band in Denver before landing at John Brown, where he says his futile efforts to play drums for a “really bad hardcore band” were upstaged only by his short-lived stint as a hapless lead singer of an emo outfit.

Initially, Jackson Waters was a self-proclaimed Southern rock band. The band’s debut CD, made independently, evoked the Black Crowes and Georgia Satellites, and a glorified knock-off at that. But as they matured as writers and musicians and played countless dates in churches, coffeehouses and clubs, Jackson Waters eventually found a way to blend such diverse backgrounds into a seriously marketable sound.

With Leonard’s soulful vocals, a tinge of earthy roots and rock as the foundation, Jackson Waters soon found itself gaining a significant number of fans throughout the region. And Leonard, who writes most of the band’s lyrics, stopped forcing the issue and started to let the music happen organically.

“I really don’t think about anything,” Leonard says of the writing process. “Songs just kind of come, and it’s like you try to get out of the way. You don’t want to tame the beast. It’s just what’s happening at the time. Words just come out.”

Spectrum of Emotions Fans can finally get a taste of Jackson Waters’ most recent efforts on the debut national release, Come Undone. In one of the band’s early press appearances, Friesen jokingly referred to the new songs as “life rock,” a label that has somehow managed to stick.

“Our music goes through a spectrum of the same kind of emotions somebody would feel at different times in their life,” he says. “We have the energetic, passionate songs, and then we have the moody, grooving songs, and we have the happier, poppy songs. People can identify with those songs because it’s part of life that we go through different moods.”

As a precursor to the full-length process, Jackson Waters released an EP featuring the title track “Center of Attention,” which started out as a song about Hawk’s ex-girlfriend but turned into a stirring metaphor for God’s grace. Using poetic, introspective lyrics and deliberate, swelling crescendos, the band found itself in the national spotlight when the tune was featured last fall on the TV show “One Tree Hill.” Within days, “Center of Attention” was one of the top 100 songs on the iTunes rock chart, and it received over 100,000 listens on MySpace.

While the band had just signed with a Christian label, all of the mainstream attention immediately caused some to wonder if Jackson Waters might be following in the footsteps of notable crossover acts such as P.O.D., Switchfoot and most recently needtobreathe. But Hawk says there’s no pressure either way.

“We write songs, and we write music that comes from within our hearts, and whoever wants to listen to it will grasp it,” he says. “If that’s the secular market, then that’s great. If that’s in the Christian market, then that’s great. I don’t think we’ve changed ourselves or our songs or what we do to fit within any mold.”

And regardless of what kind of audience Jackson Waters attracts, the band fully understands that the multiple interpretations that can come from a single song are what make the art form so powerful.

“That’s the beauty of music,” Leonard says. “You can take whatever you want from it. One song might mean something to somebody else, but it could mean something totally different to you. That’s the beauty of expression.”

Copyright © 2007 Chad Bonham. All rights reserved. International copyright secured.