Today we’d like to introduce you to Jesse David.
Every artist has a unique story. Can you briefly walk us through yours?
I’ve been a musician for as long as I can remember. I’ve spent as much time as I possibly could dedicating myself to learning more and taking advantage to every opportunity I could handle. I was in every musical organization I could be in at school from choirs to orchestras to concert bands to rock bands to musicals. I was fortunate to be in Klein ISD, where they had a lot of options. I ended up settling in on the French horn when I was about 10, and I played that through college. At around the same time I started playing the horn, Guitar Hero came out. That was my first real exposure to the music I ultimately fell in love with. That classic electric guitar sound, with the distortion and the solos and the energy, it was really irresistible. For a while, my days would be that I went to school and got my formal music education and learned classical stuff (and math and English and all the other stuff I don’t really use much anymore haha), and then when I came home, I’d lock myself in my room, put Metallica or Guns n’ Roses or AC/DC on my iPod, and just try to figure out all those riffs and solos until my family got sick of hearing the same riff and told me to stop.
So now I’m out of college, I have a degree in Music Education from Stephen F Austin, and I’m teaching private music lessons. Originally, I was on track to become a high school band director, and I was teaching at Klein High School for a little while. In that time, I realized more and more that concert band music and teaching at a public school was really not for me. My true passion was playing guitar and singing. God saw it fit to give me a job at this place called The Rehearsal Room, where I teach private lessons in the music I love, and get to put my students into little rock bands like I had in high school. I’m also playing every week at Faithbridge with some fantastic musicians, and I’m working on my own performing career. I just debuted my newest passion project, a rock n’ roll band called The Raccoon Gang, which is kinda the culmination of every musical style I love.
Please tell us about your art.
The only thing in my life that’s been more consistently present, aside from my family, is music. God has put in me a deep connection and a deep love for music that I just can’t put on the shelf. Without it, I wouldn’t be me. The more I learn, the more I want to learn. I relate the best through music, and it’s easiest to get my emotions out through music. In moments where I’ve really dived in, when I get deep into the music that I play, I feel the most like myself. I’ve had some transcendent moments as I played, and in those moments I get a sense like, “this is why God put me here,” and not even just to play music, but also to teach it and help my students find that passion in themselves.
What do you think is the biggest challenge facing artists today?
I think it’s infrastructure. So many artists want to do their art in a way that it provides for themselves, and it takes so much work upfront that may not end up making any money. If you wanna make a living as an artist, there are so many other things that you have to do that aren’t art to even have a chance of making it happen. It’s literally building a business from scratch, and most times the artist is the only employee at first.
Often times starting out, there’s no resources or market for what it is that you’re trying to do. It’s a very discouraging thing starting out, especially when you fall into the trap of comparing yourself to others. I’ll catch myself looking up famous people’s birthdays and noticing that more and more of them are my age or even younger, and that has a way of getting to me like, “what do they have that I don’t”.
But it’s important to realize that it’s all circumstance. The important thing is just to do your thing, and make it as good as you can make it. Don’t search for perfection, just get it done and put it out there. Then do that again a thousand times. It’s ok if it’s not perfect the first time. That just gives you room to grow AND it gives your audience to watch that growth happen, which is really cool.
How or where can people see your work? How can people support your work?
The Raccoon Gang’s website is the hub of all the marketing we do: theraccoongang.com
We’re on Instagram and Facebook. It’s just getting started, but I really believe that I’ve been given something special. We just put out our first music video for our debut single “Good Hands” and you can find that on our YouTube page. It’s submitted for release and should be on all the major platforms, like Spotify and iTunes, in about a week.
We’ve got plenty of music coming out soon. Right now we’re working on an album called “Demo Days [REVISITED]” which is a rehashing of our demo record, which is currently on SoundCloud and Bandcamp. We’ve got music and another video in the vault just itching to get out, and we’re working on more material.
Just follow us on our social media and you can keep up with all our concert dates, releases, updates, merch, and other ways to support and listen to the music we play.
Contact Info:
- Website: theraccoongang.com
- Email: theraccoongang@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theraccoongang/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheRaccoonGangBand
Image Credit:
Victoria Marie Photography
Jana Kay Photography
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