Interview with Miles Jones

The vastly talented DJ/Producer/emcee/songwriter/CEO of Mojo Records and Publishing, known as Miles Jones, has stepped outside of himself with his latest project The Jones Act Part III by creating a character through his music to deal with an emotional time in his life. Through struggle and reinvention, The Jones Act emerged as something beyond the boom bap hip-hop that Jones was previously known for as the emcee created a new sound for himself and a new lane with his new release, which includes not just his music, but the art of comics.
HOW DO YOU FEEL THAT YOU HAVE GROWN SINCE YOUR LAST ALBUM RUNAWAY JONES IN 2009? I think my taste for music as a fan has changed a lot since 2009. That has created a new bar for me as a creator as far as challenging myself and not staying in that hip-hop bubble, which is so easy to do, for any genre really. I started experimenting and listening a little bit more to song arrangements and structure in other music and try and apply that to what I was doing when I was creating and writing.
WHAT WAS THE VISION BEHIND YOUR LATEST PROJECT THE JONES ACT PART III? It kick-started with the single that I recorded about a year after I dropped my Runaway Jones project in 2009 and it was a song called “All Lies” and I was singing on the hook instead of getting someone else to come and sing the hook and you can say it created the blueprint to the theory and concept that I had for this record where I wanted to be able to kind of step out of myself. I find that it is a lot easier for me as an artist and as a creator to not only have to be necessarily myself in the way that, the way a writer writes a script, or the way a director directs a movie, it is sort of creating this character or imaginative space where you can allow yourself to express all these different sides. I was going through a lot… My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer and I was dealing with that and a few things career wise that were changing and I felt that music was my outlet during that time and I was able to use The Jones Act as an escape and you can hear that in the record.
WHAT CHALLENGES DID YOU FACE WHEN PUTTING OUT THE NEW ALBUM? A challenge is always picking which songs that the industry wants to hear as your “single” or your hit and when you’re so close to a project and you’re so attached to something, it’s really hard to be objective and really feel what’s right for yourself and also what is right for your audience or for what the media is going to write about. I think that’s a constant ongoing challenge. For this project, we did something a little bit different. I had a comic book writer create an issue of a comic to a song called “Catch Me in the Rye”, which is track four on the record and it turned into an actual comic that we showcased at this comic convention and it spawned into this comic series. There is going to be other comic books written to go with each song on the record so it’s cool having the hit song and the music video, but I think for this record, I wanted to do something different and do something to make the listener think a little bit more and dig a little bit deeper than the traditional ways that we are told that we are supposed to consume music… It’s still a challenge to really push some of these ideas… My team and I are trying to figure out how to get these ideas to the forefront and inspire other artists to try these things as well.