Few musicians know the peaks and perils of modern music marketing as well as Jackie Venson. Prior to the pandemic, Venson had racked up opportunities that most musicians would kill for– appearances on network tv spots like The Late Show, high profile tours with artists like Gary Clark Jr, highly coveted gigs at festivals like ACL, and on and on.
Few musicians know the peaks and perils of modern music marketing as well as Jackie Venson. Prior to the pandemic, Venson had racked up opportunities that most musicians would kill for– appearances on network tv spots like The Late Show, high profile tours with artists like Gary Clark Jr, highly coveted gigs at festivals like ACL, and on and on. But it was the crash of the pandemic that arguably led to Venson’s biggest attention as the singer-guitarist’s constant live streaming efforts rocketed her to viral “fame” and top 10 placement on PollStar’s Top Livestreamers list, ahead of big names as diverse as Brad Paisley, Norah Jones, and Ben Gibbard of Deathcab for Cutie. And now her new album Ghost in the Machine is tackling the chaos and confusion of the music industry head on with one simple message: almost everything artists have been told they have to do to “make it” is no longer true and the industry as we know it is dead, but doesn’t realize it yet, and it’s up to us to release the ghost of creativity lingering inside the machine.
Longtime fans will recognize the material on Ghost in the Machine from various formats over the past few years, but Venson considers it a “do-over” of her 2020 LP Vintage Machine. “When everything went down in 2020, we didn’t really get an opportunity to put this album out the way I intended,” Venson explains, “I didn’t get a release party, I didn’t get to tour, I didn’t do any of the things you’re really supposed to do when you release an album.” But rather than accept the old industry trope that once you’ve put something out, you have to move on from it after a year or so, Venson decided to go back and recreate the album to suit the vision she now had for it, as something that was ever-shifting and evolving because the more she thought about it, the more she realized there was no reason to abide by traditional music industry tactics anymore.
“As modern artists dealing with audiences that are increasingly widespread and distracted, there’s no reason why anything we release has to stay frozen in amber while we move on to newer projects,” Venson says, “I mean, most of my current audience just discovered me in the past couple of years, and I realized so much of my older music is new to them, so why shouldn’t I redo it to make it sound more like who I am now?” That central question fits the theme of the album as well, as Venson explores the battle between staying true to tradition and embracing new ideas and techniques that so many musicians operating in genres, such as the blues, face every single day.
Lead single “Vintage Machine” explores this in depth, shifting between bubbly electro-funk and bluesy guitar rock as Venson interrogates the myth the modern industry has for musicians to be content making machines. The new video for “Vintage Machine,” directed by horror filmmaker Dakota Millett, cheekily reflects that as it shows Jackie and her band getting picked off one by one by cyborg monsters who want to turn them into musical automatons.
Fan favorite “Lofi” also shows off the electro-funk side of Jackie’s personality, with a New Wave beat and chirping synth leads, but its bright exterior is juxtaposed by the lyrics, which strike back at the expectation capitalism has for all of us to be endlessly producing. “‘Hey, you need to get some sun, you need to get some sleep’/’When the hell,’ I ask, ‘What you think?” goes one of Venson’s internal debates in the song, while elsewhere she confesses she struggles to even tell what time it is because the days and nights blur together when you’re never not working.
On TikTok-favorite “Make Me Feel,” Venson celebrates the rarity of finding someone who truly gets you and makes you feel so good all of those anxieties and struggles melt away, if only for a moment at a time.
It’s that message of personal connection that Jackie hopes comes through the most at the end of Ghost in the Machine, because the vision Jackie and her like minded peers have for the music industry is one where community and connection triumph over greed, convenience and algorithms.
From Jackie Venson’s standpoint, the music industry as we have known it is a corpse held together by evil machinery and it’s only by relearning how to directly connect with one another that we can free the ghost of art
