There comes a point in the life of many a songwriter where the pull to move outside the comfort and familiarity of their “day job” band becomes too strong to ignore. It seems increasingly as the music industry continues to change in the post-Napster era that we find ourselves in that this occurs now more than ever as working class artists, especially in the traditionally DIY corners of the scene, continue to try to eke out a consistent living in spite of ever-dwindling record sales.
The latest to throw his hat into the solo singer-songwriter ring is Jared Hart, frontman for long-running New Jersey street punk band The Scandals. Though the band’s output of recorded music has waned a bit in recent years for one reason or another, the band have kept busy on the road, finding themselves regular touring companions of their fellow New Jersey brethren in The Gaslight Anthem. The last several years have also found Hart taking to the solo act thing, lumping his acoustic guitar and some Scandals merch into a car and playing shows primarily across the Eastern half of the country. “That’s one of the most fun parts about the whole thing,” explains Hart, speaking specifically of a group of New Hampshire natives that made the trip to a recent Hart gig in Boston. “On one of my first acoustic tours, I played in their living room. There were maybe 30 or 40 kids there, and it was crazy. It was one of those experiences where you realize there’s no other way you’d be hanging out with these people unless you were on tour with your guitar in their fucking living room. I would have never been friends with them, let alone would they have heard my music, if I didn’t just grab an acoustic and hop in a car.”

While many of these were of the one-off or “long weekend tour” variety, Hart is presently in the midst of a nationwide tour opening for another Jersey rocker turned solo artist, My Chemical Romance’s Frank Iero. The present tour kicked off at the above-mentioned Boston show on November 1st, with Hart taking the stage solo less than 24 hours after playing a rousing full-band Scandals show at FEST 14 in Gainesville. Cutting ones teeth in sweaty, dingy punk rock bars comprises a vastly different audience than playing for the MCR faithful, who continue to come out in droves and who still tend to trend younger and more evenly split along gender lines than one’s normal punk rock show. “It’s a different kind of crowd, and it’s been a different experience from the shows I’m used to playing, but it’s all positive,” says Hart.
While much of Hart’s solo live set is still peppered with time-tested Scandals staples (“Avalanche,” “Four Seventeen,” etc.), he’s touring now primarily in support of his forthcoming debut full length. Entitled “Past Lives & Pass Lines,) the album is culled from a series of tracks written over the last several years that didn’t quite fit as Scandals tracks, but that were worthy of seeing the light of day nonetheless. “Every song on the record can kind of be related to a point in my life where something fucked up happened,” Hart explains. What started as a couple songs recorded for a split 7-inch release turned into ten of the more personal songs from Hart’s songwriting catalog. “I didn’t want to have a downer song on a Scandals record, so I’d save them. And then I started pocketing them and pocketing them and pocketing them and all of a sudden I had all these songs…”

As more solo shows lined themselves up as the months continued, Hart found his stockpile of songs not only growing, but trending in a particular direction allowing closure for some of the above-mentioned “fucked up” events. The songs, says Hart, are “kind of bookmarks. I think that as things happened and progressed and things happened, I realized there’s a common theme with all of them. They were very cathartic to write in the sense of “I’m saying this, I have this point in time, and I can put this here and leave it here.” Though some of the tracks date back to 2010, thematically, they began to “lump together as a whole and become an entity together instead of just one song.”
If you’re worried “Past Lives & Pass Lines” finds Hart wandering down the road-more-traveled that is typical for the punk-frontman-goes-solo set, fret not. While certainly centered around the acoustic, there’s more than enough experimentation to keep things sounding newer and different. “My buddy Frank (Marra, the album’s producer) was super experimental,” explains Hart. “From day one, he said “I want to get weird on this. I want to throw some stuff out there.” So we just did that and we’d layer it and look at each other when it sounded bad and delete it right away!”
It can be a bit of a tenuous decision to announce to one’s bandmates that you’re going to put out an album of material that doesn’t include them. A great many people who’ve come before opted for the solo direction when things had blown up, or just dried up, with the bands that they cut their teeth with. Luckily for Hart, and for fans and friends of The Scandals, things are presently all good on both fronts. “They’ve seen me working on this for a year-and-a-half and they’ve been super supportive. So there wasn’t a need for a sitdown where I had to break to them that I was putting (The Scandals) on hold. So I’m lucky in that sense. They’ve all been pretty stoked about it,” says Hart with a sense of relief and happiness in his voice. “So if the Scandals can do six months and I can do six months, it’s perfect. If the Scandals can do ten months and I can do two months with this, that’s great!”

More than a decade into plowing ahead a decision to make a living as a working musician, Hart continues to be about as busy as he’s ever been, a sign that a long-shot gamble might become closer to paying off. The EP that The Scandals recorded with Brian Fallon close to a year ago is finally, hopefully, about to see the light of day early next year, which will hopefully parlay into another Scandals full-length. In the mix, hopefully, will be solo and full-band trips across the pond. “The Scandals and the solo thing definitely have to get out there,” says Hart hopefully. “I have some friends that are going to be releasing the solo record over there, so that’s big on the radar right now, trying to plan the year around that, because those are big chunks of time. Hopefully it’s another busy one; that’s all I’m asking for!”
Past Lives & Pass Lines is due out November 27th on Say-10 Records. Pre-orders are available here. In the meantime, you can stream the album here, and read our full conversation below.
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