Potentially one of the most exciting fields to come out of fashion in recent years is the idea of digital fashion, and one of the big players in this field is Jackson Cowden, who has won various awards because of his talents in the field. While we were speaking with Jackson, something that really struck me was his strong stance and highly educated approach, as well as embracing rather than rejecting new ideas. We recently sat down and spoke with Jackson about the field of 3D fashion design, Astelle House, and the interesting way he obtains inspiration.
I was doing a bit of research on the stuff that you do, and I guess the field you're in is called 3D fashion, right? I think that's a bit of an interesting field because it's still relatively unknown. Could you tell us a bit about what it actually is and how you got into it?
So I'll start with how I got into it, because then it sets a framework of what it is. It's a funny story how I got into it- it was during the lockdown period, and as you know, all the crypto and NFT currencies were booming during that. People needed something to occupy their minds. There are these things in the NFT project called ‘whitelists,’ which is pretty much a priority list so you can purchase the NFT, which you can flip and make a profit on top of it. A way to get into these whitelists was creating fan art, and I started creating fan art through digital fashion. I started putting the mockups of people's face masks of their projects on the face mask, and then sending that into the fan art channels. Pretty much, the owners of that project really want the creativity to flourish because of their values and beliefs. That put me onto these whitelists, and it was an income stream for me when nothing else was happening during the lockdowns. From there, I realised there's actually something to it. You can actually make money from doing these digital mockups, and I was studying fashion design at the time so I combined the two- digital fashion and physical fashion- into creating a conceptual brand for uni. I would create the digital looks, but then bring them to life through physical garments. That gave me a way to monetize this, as well as use it in a creative process. Straight out of uni, I got approached for jobs because of this process that I had built from digital production to physical production and bringing things to life. That's the origin story of how I got into it.
Digital fashion itself, it's hard to explain, but I suppose digital fashion is a way in which independent designers and creatives can visualise their ideas without having a budget and production team. As you probably know, and as many brands say, production cost is one of the major things that limits our creativity. But with a digital medium, I can use a subscription to an app that allows me to create whatever I want to create before I even do the physical production. With our world being so content dominant at the moment, I can produce content without even bringing something to life. It's hard to explain such a new thing on the market, without using the lingo inside of the industry.
How new is this field? I saw an article that said it would’ve been about five years now.
They’ve been using the programme ‘CLO 3D’ to create the product samples before visualising it, but the whole content aspect of digital fashion marketing has only really come about in recent years. They call it FOOH (fake out-of-home) marketing, and that is essentially the 3D videos that you see coming out of billboards, like the Nike shoe popping out or The North Face jacket getting put on the Eiffel Tower. That has blown up over the past two years and skyrocketed digital fashion to this new medium where content is dominating over production value. Subsequently, a lot of digital fashion artists are shifting towards being content creators visually, rather than being on the production side and in amongst the fashion brand team. That shift has probably occurred just because of the boom in reels and that social media format that you can get millions of viral views on.
Obviously when you were in high school you wanted to do something in fashion I’m assuming, but when you were in high school, was that something you envisioned? You will go into, like, obviously you want to do fashion, I'm assuming. But did you ever think that it would come to this level?
Well to me in high school, 3D was this completely untappable market. It's just something that these major studios like Pixar and DreamWorks do, and to get into that, you have to study for years and years on end and then get a job in the industry. It's pretty much becoming a filmmaker back when filmmaking was hard to do and. In high school, it just didn’t cross my mind at all because I could only visualise what was in front of me, which, at the time, was pieces of paper and fabrics. I'd never really touched any softwares on the computer like Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, so I wasn't digitally versed in any of those formats. But in Victoria, in school we have Visual Communications as a subject. I can’t remember exactly what the brief was for the final project in my year, but I ended up creating a brand that had a garment and a shoe. It was so simple- I just as sourced a blank hoodie and put a design on it, because at the time you don't even know how to construct a hoodie, let alone how to create a brand around it and everything. It was the simplest thing of getting a blank hoodie from Alibaba and then painting a graphic on it. I didn’t know how to create a print and a silk screen! It was really day one type of stuff.
It's definitely crazy when you look back on things and where you were in school.
Yeah, it's amazing. Those things were the most fun, because it was the kind of stuff where you get thrown into the deep end and working things out while you're doing it. That's where creative problem solving really comes from. You leap on a project that you don't think you're capable of, but when you're in the midst of it, creative problem solving comes about, and that's just the machine that’s building in your mind. When those new obstacles come about, you see that not as an obstacle, but as an opportunity to create something
I saw you recently did a TikTok where you wrote a bit about AI and how it will eventually have an effect on your work. Obviously, AI is becoming more advanced, so what your thoughts on it right now and what are the effects?
Yeah, it's pretty insane. I think I had different thoughts on it a week ago to what I have now, just because it's so rampant in the advances it's making every week. It’s something new and something industry breaking. For instance, Sora came out recently, which is a text to video generator. The videos at the point where it's going to take over stock footage. It can even start making 3D animation movies just from text prompts. At first, it’s a bit frightening because you feel threatened as anyone would- it's going to come for your jobs and everything I've been working on for three years are some thoughts that came to mind. Some machine and a person who can communicate well with the machine can do everything I've been learning to do for the past five years. But a switch of mind happens after a certain point. You realise the people that are communicating well with these machines are the ones that know the ins and outs of AI and have put in those five years I speak about into a craft where they know how to light, how to make a dynamic scene, how to make it personal, how to connect with an audience. Those are the people that are going to be creating amazing works with these AI machines.
That shift in perspective helps you realise that AI is going to be another tool for creative workflow, just as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator has been in digital communication. All we used to have was on paper, and you'd have to scan that in or go to a printing press to print out something. Now we can use the Adobe suite. That Adobe Suite will soon be taken over by AI tools, and we'll use that suite instead. It's just a flow on effect and it's about how you respond to these things and continually learning. I would say never be closed minded in these things, because all closed mindedness is going to do is just leave you behind.
I like that perspective of being open to change and adapting. But in general, do you think it's taking away from the world’s creativity, just having AI to do all these things?
Yeah, and there is that as well when we start depending on something that is only able to create from what has already been created. I believe it's going to lead to a cycle of everything looking the same. When a machine has the same inputs, it's going to give the same outputs unless there are creatives that are going beyond and still creating new works of art. The machines aren't going to have new inputs to bring in and create new outputs. Therefore, if everybody is relying on AI, it's going to be catastrophic, and it's just going to be creating the same thing over and over again. But if some people are using AI and some people are still creating and letting these engines use their work, then it will be a flow on effect and still be progressing. There’s this guy who words it really well, and he says: “The way AI is marketed is just a new version of the old promise of perpetual motion. It cannot produce any new information about the world that hasn’t already been discovered by humans. A generated video of an ant tells us nothing new about ants that wasn’t already in the original data. I always considered the creative process as a form of discovery. The promise of a perpetual motion machine of creativity rests on very muddy assumptions of how new ideas are generated. Knowledge and creativity are not a library of data, but a continuous, dynamic process that requires interaction with the real world. Just as with perpetual motion machines, artificial content might look like free energy for a while, but eventually it will grind to a halt unless real humans make the effort to go out there and wind it up again.” I just think those words are so perfect. That idea of the perpetual motion machine, where you have to give it a push. It'll work for a while, and then it will eventually stop unless it is given a push again.
So let's talk about a bit about your philosophies and processes. I've read the Vogue interview and it said that you wrote a short essay to explain why you aren't following trends to your lecturer. To me, in my short experience at uni, lecturers don't really bother reading something like that or take into account those things. So my first part of this question is, what was so potent about that essay that made your lecturer change her mind, and what has influenced you in the past to have these ideas?
I guess in most universities, you're not seen as an individual as much as what I got the luxury of doing at my uni (Billy Blu College of Design.) My uni had a class of twelve people, so you have a luxury of having one-on-one time with a lecturer every week, and that means you get this personal connection with them where they know your design or design philosophy and you get to know them a little bit too as they're your mentor. Their design philosophy almost drips down to you, just because you're so close with this person for three days a week. We shared the same sentiment of conceptual design over commercial design.
I think I wrote a 500-word essay about how all that happens in the fashion world is conceptual. Designers create things. Bigger brands see those smaller conceptual designers, and they find a way to merchandise through their own channels. The bigger brands are just eating the ideas of the smaller designers, and the only way to get rid of that is by outrunning these bigger brands. And by outrunning these bigger brands, I mean creating looks and designs that are five/ten years ahead of what is being made now. A lot of people will say you're the designer's designer or you're the skateboarder’s skater. They're the people that the skaters are looking to for the new tricks, the new inspiration, the ones that are pushing the boundaries. Then the skaters can come back and give their audience these new tricks. The same goes for the design world, and especially the fashion world. For example, Vivienne Westwood. She was considered the designer’s designer because she was ten years ahead of the time. That meant the designers that were the commercial bodies and the commercial brands were looking at her for inspiration. That slipped into a lot of my design philosophy, which I think has pushed me towards a lot of the digital fashion stuff. Obviously for now it's not seen as a big market, but in 5-10 years, who's to say that digital fashion isn't the dominant form and we're looking for digital fashion in order to get inspiration for physical products?
It must be a challenge, always being a step ahead, or five or ten years. how do you know that something's going to be like that that far into the future in fashion?
It's very true. I think a lot of the inspiration for works that come 5-10 years on is from everything outside of the fashion world. Movies that are pushing the boundaries. I enjoy sci-fi a lot, which is already tens to thousands of years in the future. A lot of the costume design inside of these sci-fi films and books have already done the work of putting you into this world where you're 10,000 years in the future. And if you can hone in on that world that the book or the movie has created and think of what the people are wearing in this time, then you're automatically given almost a brief to create a collection that is 10,000 years in the future.
Throughout school I took in a lot of German Expressionism, which isn't new. It was made back in the 1920s when Germany only watched German films during the war. It’s sensitive stuff, but it’s so expressional and surreal. It's even more surreal than a Wes Anderson film, and Wes Anderson at the moment is probably the most surreal artists that is making movies at the moment. Poor Things was a great movie that I saw a couple months ago that I think actually took inspiration from German Expressionism. That's why I loved it so much. It’s this surrealist movement that references Salvador Dali's creations, Picasso's paintings. It isn't the conventional things you’d look at. So yeah, I would say Poor Things is a movie that I've been looking at recently for inspiration. As well as any of the Blade Runner's and Ridley Scott's work is always a good point of reference. In amongst that there's an audience to the work, as well as there's something unconventional about it.
My second question on this topic, I mean it's a bit more broad, but you talk about not following trends and things. In my first interview, I spoke to a runner, so he's not into fashion at all or anything. But he was talking to me about how he hates fast fashion and things like that, so from your perspective as someone that is in the fashion industry, what are your thoughts on it?
I love fast fashion! But no, seriously I don't think you'll come across a lot of creatives or designers that do buy into fast fashion and the ones that are creating for it probably don't want to say it either- they probably want to go under the books. But there’s so much said about fast fashion, whether it be the green washing, the sustainable effects, the slave labour, or the continual cycle of the psychology of fashion, really. Obviously, fashion has a cyclical nature in itself, and that's how it keeps progressing and progressing the art form. It’s getting shorter and shorter and cheaper and cheaper for an audience, and the only thing that it's really doing is giving us a debt to this world. What I mean by that is it may be cheap for us out of our pockets and wallets, but what it is taking from is the world, whether that be the sustainability crisis, climate change, the slave labour. It's all happening internationally. That's accruing a bigger debt than what we're paying out of our pocket, so we may be paying $5 for a T-shirt, but we're paying ten years off of this world's life. I don't usually go into sustainable stuff, but when you talk about fast fashion and stuff like that, it's hard not to.
100%. Was that something that you tried to convey with Astelle, like you wanted to do something that lasted for a long time?
Yeah, exactly. You can probably see that through our Earth collections and our love of nature and all of our shoots. We may not be vocal about it, but both me and Spencer have a love for life and a love for a romanticism for everything that's around us. It's those minute things that a lot of people take for granted that should be romanticised in life. And I think all us boys, Zakk, Simo and Dyl as well, we all share that romanticism for those small moments and that respect for life that maybe we have taken for granted at some point in our lives.
Yeah, definitely. That's very interesting because yeah, normally you don't find people that keep those small things in mind that much. But for all of you to all think about that and all be together is super rare.
Yeah exactly, that joint philosophy. We got a cult going on!
That's funny. This next one is more of a question for me, but other people might want to know it as well. But when you started Astelle, obviously you started from scratch. You had no audience or whatever. How did you get the product out there at the start, from scratch with no help or anything?
We're very lucky in that Spencer is a very extroverted person, which means that he can form a connection, even in a minute. He can talk about something for hours on end with anyone. That meant that although we started from scratch and started with a following of zero, that number quickly sprouted. We started selling dozens of orders within a couple of weeks because of his nature, because of the person that he is, and yeah, we have a lot to attribute to Spencer for that growth in Astelle being so quick and making it a viable brand from the start. As well as that, the timing and the circumstances that we started in during the lockdowns, it meant that a lot of people were looking for connections over social channels. If you can give an honest and you can be vulnerable online in that sense, you're going to connect with people that are looking for those connections. It was probably that contribution of circumstance at the time, as well as Spencer's outgoing and extroverted nature that allowed us to build an audience and realise it was something that could be more than just a T-shirt brand that where we sold a couple of things to our mates.
So was it just a case of going out there and just talking to people? Or is he just messaging everyone on Instagram?
He is an Instagram fanatic. He'll go through and DM people, and they’ll just chat sh*t for ages. It's actually how we first got into contact with Simo. There's this funny story about Simo, where pretty much he was bullying Spencer in the DMs and then come two months later, we're the best of mates laughing about it. He was just absolutely relentless on Instagram through that period. He would DM anyone he saw. The thing is, he wouldn't DM to get something out of it. He wouldn't DM someone and say, “oh, we've got this brand we're working on. Come follow it.” It would be something like, “I love this post that you’ve done, tell me more!” His nature is just that he’s such a curious person, and people love him because he's so interested in what you're doing.
We both like this YouTuber, Van Neistat, who’s Casey Neistat’s brother. It's a lot more artistic and creative leaning than Casey’s. And Spencer just went out and started messaging Van, and then he started messaging the sound guy that did Van’s videos. They started this weeklong conversation with the sound guy that does the videos. It's just the stuff like that he has the ability to do. But the meat riding of Spencer is crazy!
I can't believe there's not more articles about it or anything on the Internet, but I’ve heard you used to be a gun footballer back in the day. How is the transition from something like footy to design?
How did you find that out?! I wouldn’t say I was a gun. I had a cool spurt of getting into cool teams for a while. I guess footy for me was an outlet for life at the time where I would go five days a week and just play footy, playing for two different teams at a time. I was always kicking the ball around after training, doing those extra little efforts, and I think it has a lot to do with the disciplined side of my personality at the moment.
Footy for me, the reason I was good at it was because I would always take that creative approach to something. My dad always said that half back was my best position because I would always be able to read the play and know what's going to happen before it's happened, and if it doesn't happen that way, you have that problem solving mindset where you can switch everything and create a new solution. So throughout my footy career, I was still using that creative mindset to outwit my opponent rather than do it physically. I wasn't the fastest and I couldn't jump the highest, but I would still be able to read the ball in the air and think of where it's going to go before it's getting there.
When I was talking to Simon, he was talking about how he wants to be a fashion guy, but he also wants to be active at the same time. And stereotypically, and I'm going to emphasise stereotypically, those elite footy players don't really have talent in design and things like that. How did you juggle between the two? And how did design eventually win out over footy?
The others don’t got the drip! No but seriously, I haven’t put thought into it. It's a really good question. I guess Simon says it a lot, about how his short shorts have been inspired from the shortest of shortest footy shorts, and his design philosophy has spoken to that a lot. But for me, I guess you never really pair fashion with sport, especially AFL at the moment. You pair it with the NBA and a lot of American sports just because of their PR, and they've got stylists and they know how to build a personal brand. I think footy over the next 10 years is getting there- I think GQ did an article with people like Lance Franklin, and they styled them and put them on the cover. I do see fashion coming more to the forefront of the AFL.
To speak on how I shifted from footy to design, I genuinely can't think of an answer at the moment. It’s such a good question because I haven't even thought about it myself. I've always had those little creative outlets, for example I used to paint those little figurines during school, and I always used to draw, and I got into game design for a little bit. I've always had these little things that I've tried out over the years. But there was never like a switch of where I've gone, “alright, f*ck footy, let's do design.” It was more of a gradual transition.
Did you ever see footy as a long term goal?
I did at some stages, yeah. I think through that period where I had all the opportunities to do it, I wasn't mature enough as I am now to realise the spot I was in and realise the hard work it took to be the one that stood out and be noticed during the games. I know a lot of people say it, but if I could turn back time, I would approach every game with a different mindset, but that's something I've learned more recently and I've taken that into my philosophy of design now where I approach every project like it's a new season or a new game. You have to be putting in so much more effort than you even think is necessary in order to get those results and those expectations that you want to meet.
What's the mark of a good fashion creative in your eyes?
Wow, that’s a good question. The mark of a good fashion creative I think is someone who speaks true to who they are, whether that be Simon's philosophy about romanticising the Italian-Australian culture or footy. If you looked at Simo, you would know what he's going to design. That being said, the same goes for Mutimer. If you looked at the way he styles himself, you know how and what he's going to design. If you look at Zakk and the jewellery and fashion he's wearing, you know what jewellery is going to come out the very next week. If you can look at look at someone and know by the way they're presenting themselves what they have the capabilities of creating, I think that's a really good mark of a creator.
I guess this next question as well is a bit on the same topic, but when I was in school I did art and we always had a theme that we had to work around, and the thing I found the most difficult was writing out the rationale and justifying the work because you know what you're trying to do, but it's hard to put into words. I would say that yours are always so clearly written. It always looks like that you have tonnes to say on everything you do so what messages in particular do you try and convey? Because it must be something that you're passionate about.
Yeah 100%, I think you just pinpointed it there. It's something that you have to be passionate about. You would know from doing art, but from the moment you get given the brief, your mind has gone through hundreds of different ideas and has come up on one solution. There's no way you can rationalise that first ten minutes where your brain is going crazy, and then it comes up with a solution. A lot of the time a rationale is trying to figure out what you were thinking at that moment where you had the idea. For me, a rationale will come at the end of the project as it does for a lot of people. But what I do is I try to put myself in the circumstances of where I came up with that initial idea and try try to figure out, “oh, how did I actually come up with that?” Backtrack from that idea that you conceptualise. How did you even get there? When you're in the midst of that, you have no idea where you're going.
It becomes very hard when you have to do this to clients as well. You have to rationalise your ideas to a client, because a lot of the time the client will come to you for a creative solution and you give them the solution. It'll go on for two weeks, you'll deliver the solution and they'll want to make adjustments and changes to it all. You'll go through those adjustments and changes, but then they'll come back to that original idea and go, “oh, that was actually the best one.” You just have to be humble about it. It's a muscle that has to be strengthened over time. You have to understand how you'll get into these creative ideas and how you can articulate them better to an audience. I've struggled over the past years to articulate my ideas, especially. Being dropped into such a creative field with creative people, you can understand each other because you understand where and how this person's brain is working. But if you're trying to articulate this idea to someone who has never been in the creative field or doesn't regularly think creatively, it's a whole different language. I think that muscle of rationalising has been strengthened by a lot of reading and writing, which has been probably my biggest hobby over the past year.
You talk about in the first 10 minutes you get a whirlwind of ideas. Do you ever get creative block or anything?
I'll say two things on this. A big thing for me is if you have creative block, you just have to dirty the page. By that I mean, if you have a blank canvas in front of you, it's going to stay a blank canvas until you do something to it, so you may as well just put sh*t on it. That perfect blank canvas that has so much potential isn't perfect anymore. It's smudged. It's a murky canvas now that you don't have to ruin. Now you can make it better. So that's a philosophy I've taken to a lot of my work whenever I start a document or a drawing of a fashion silhouette. Even just scrunch up the paper or write a few lines on the document about what you did today, because then that document to you isn't a perfect blank canvas. It's something that is imperfect, that you can make better. That’s something that's helped me a lot with that initial creative block when starting a new project.
I get a lot of creative block when you have an expectation for a project and you're doing so much to get it to that expectation, but you don't know where to take it from when you haven’t met those expectations. Talking about AI before, I've actually used AI to help me reiterate in that final stage of a project where I can't get it to where my expectations think it should be. If I have an image and it's not met my expectations for the project, I'll chuck it through an AI generator and type in some random prompts to see what direction it can go in order to come out to where I expected it to be. That’s just another example of using AI as a tool instead of thinking it as something that's going to take over.
Did I also see one of your artworks outside the Sydney Opera House? Is that right?
That's actually all digitally done! That wasn't a physical thing. I had a bit of free time between projects, and I wanted to create something cool. It's called out of home marketing. I created that little art piece- it’s called Dated Surveillance- which is pretty much all these old books and CCTV cameras on them. The message behind it is surveillance doesn't really take place on cameras anymore. They call it the digital panopticon, where we're willingly giving up our information through social channels in order to stay in the loop. If you think about it, it's a much easier way of surveying a mass population than just capturing them on CCTV cameras. When we're talking about things on our phone and then they magically appear as advertisements, it’s things like that.
It's all a bit scary at the moment, but the scariest thing is you can't really shy away from it. You can't get away from it. It's always there if you want to stay in the loop. If you want to know what your friends are doing? Let them know what you're doing. It's just a part of the way we conduct life from now on.
Cool, so I've got a couple more here for you. You talked about your reading and writing a bit, and I wanted to ask- firstly, what do you write about? Is it a lot of journaling and stuff like that, because I was talking to Hamish Bloom, and he uses poetry as an outlet for expressing himself. So for you, what do you write and read about that makes you so caught up on the things that you are interested in?
I read a lot of sci-fi novels, whether that be short stories, old stories, new stories. I also read a lot of business stuff just because I want to be well versed in business as well as creativity, because you fall behind if you don't have one or the other. It's the best way to learn things- as well as watching and listening to podcasts and YouTube videos at the same time. What else do I read? Obviously fashion stuff, but that's more visual. Art books are a lot more visual as well, but I have this thing where I hate the traditional coffee table books. Those coffee table books that Dior and stuff make, they just take up space and they serve no purpose. You probably buy them for $150.00, you flick through them once and then you're done, and now it's just an ornament in your room! I would much rather just spend $12.00 on a Penguin book, and that gives me two weeks of either leisure or education. Whether that Penguin book is a classic or is historical, or even an old or new age story, it doesn't really concern me as long as I'm interested. I have interest in everything, so that habit of reading that I do every night, it doesn't matter what it is I'm reading as long as I am doing it.
What I write on, I write short stories, and like Hamish, it's a form of expression outside of fashion and digital and is something that I don't show or I don't put out into the world for critique. It's just a thing I do, and then put it away and then start a new one. I have done journaling in the past, but I don't know. It doesn't seem to have the same effect on me as a lot of other people speak about. I used to also write essays like the one I gave to that lecturer, if something is on my mind and I care so much about it.
That's good. Especially trying to be as well-rounded as you are, I think that's something more people need. When you talk about these sci-fi books, because when I read a book, and I don't know if it's bad or not, but I just read the words and I think a lot of people do that. When you talk about how you get inspiration for fashion from these sci-fi books, do you envision what's happening in the book in your brain? Do you paint a picture of it or do you take the words in?
I think about this every single that time I'm reading actually. It's something I really have to focus on because, like you said, it's so easy to read the words and digest them for what they are. I wish I was that person that could read something and see that actual image right in front of them. There are people that can imagine something and actually see it happening in front of them. I wish I was that person, but I'm not, and through primary school, I was never a good reader and I was in the subgroup that got taken out of the classroom to do extra reading. I remember the lesson that I got taught in those little one-on-one readings was to visualise every single word that you're reading. No matter how slow or how quick you want to do it, just create a scene in your head that is taking place from those words. I still find it very difficult to do that, but I'm constantly finding myself reading a page while I've been thinking about 20 other things and I'll have to go back to the top of the page and set myself as if I'm a filmmaker inside a room and place these things as I'm reading about them. It might seem funny, but I take a cartoon-y approach of where if it's describing a chair, it'll look like a wooden chair. The next phrase will be something like, “has a cushion on it,” and a cushion will pop up in a cartoon-y effect. It's very much like an olden day cartoon where these things are popping up randomly in the scene that you've created. I just wish I was that person that could picture things subconciously.
It's takes so much energy and it's so tiring to do, and it can take me 10 minutes to read one page if it’s a descriptive setting. I've got to concentrate on all the trees over here, or the castles here, or the flying car or something else over here. It’s worth it because you get that visual inspiration, and like you said, they aren’t just words anymore. It's a movie that's taking place in front of you.
I'll ask you two more. We've got a playlist of our guests selections, so if you've got a few songs that you're listening to the past few weeks or days, or even some of your favourites of all time, let us hear them.
I'm terrible with names- but M83, My Tears are Becoming a Sea. I won't do too many M83 songs because I want to be a little bit broad, but I'll do M83 Outro as well. They're from the same album. Honestly man, I don't even know what I listen to. I just chuck it on and whatever is playing, I listen to. I’ve been listening to a bit of Gang of Youths at the moment, because it's summer, and you just drive around in your car, wind the window down, and smash some Gang of Youths. It's always good. Spencer O’Leary of course, always listening to him!
I'd never listened to music until I was 16. The only song I remember from before I was 16 was Gym Class Heroes, Stereo Hearts. When I was 16, it was all rap that I listened to, like Juice Wrld. I was fortunate enough to see Juice Wrld before he passed away, so we’ll put some Juice in there too.
Alright last one, do you have any words of wisdom, people to shoutout, or things to promote?
OK, I've got nothing to promote, because I'm not selling anything at the moment. Other than that, follow my Instagram!
People to shout out, you've probably heard these names a million times over the past interviews, but Spence, Zakk, Simo, Dyl, Mutimer, the Dous boys, Berg and Kieran. Who else? Porter James. Oh, it's going to hurt me so much that I've forgotten people. I can keep naming people, but I'll stick with that.
And then, words of wisdom. I don't know if you should be taking on my wisdom, but maybe that’s the words of wisdom- don’t take anyone else’s wisdom! There's so much cliche sh*t you could say, but there are a couple things that come to mind. I’m going to steal what Simo said to me one day and take it as my own. He said, “you can be so confident in your abilities that you never do the work.” That for me has been such a good philosophy and wisdom to take on. You may believe in yourself so much, but how are you going to show other people and make them believe in you? The only way to do that is by doing the work and sharing the work with the world. The other thing I’ll say, find a mentor or an idol to look up to in every area of your life. Find someone who had the career you want and reach out to them for a relationship. Find someone who has a perfect work-life balance and reach out to them. Find someone who has the body and gym routine you desire and follow their steps. Nobody has everything worked out, but if you take the best parts from each of your mentors or idols, you will get pretty close to a perfectly balanced life. I'll leave it at that! That was amazing.
Jackson's Links: Instagram / Nyvora Studios
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