Jeremy Zucker, love is not dying
Check out love is not dying and office's exclusive interview with Zucker below.
Hi Jeremy, how are you doing?
I'm doing solid. I'm living in Brooklyn right now with my roommate just hunkering down, getting through all this nonsense.
What has quarantine looked like for you?
I've been cooking a lot, trying to stay active and working out inside. I've been making a lot of music from home. My studio is like a short walk from my apartment, so I've been doing that. I just put out the album, so normally I would be flying around doing a bunch of press. I'm sort of doing all of that remotely, which allows me to spend more time making music, which is nice. But I still sort of feel stuck at home.
Congratulations on your album, by the way. How are you feeling since putting it out?
Definitely relieved. The weight's off my shoulders. It's a project that I've been sitting on for quite a long time. I'm really excited that it's out there. But, you know, I'm already sort of thinking about the next thing, but I guess I'm just anxious for the project to be like out for an extended period of time just so I can like see how it affects people and how the songs grow and exist in people's lives. That's always been my favorite part about like looking at the data and stuff, seeing how it's changing over a long period of time. But while I'm doing that, I'll be writing new music, which should be really exciting.
Speaking of music, what kind of inspired the title for your album, love is not dying?
A really specific life experience shaped that title. But, you know, the album is really about a lot of different things, but I feel like love can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. I guess the easy answer is that it's about a lot of different kinds of love and all of these scenarios that I found myself within the past year and a half—some really nice and some really difficult. I don't want to get too much into the specifics of the title, because I do want to leave it open to interpretation.
You've talked about how a theme in the album is accepting beauty in a moment while knowing that things aren't perfect. Do you feel like that's something you've had to learn to do?
In this case, that was about a specific scenario, but I think it is a difficult thing to live in the moment and accept the present and not worry about the future. It's a difficult thing, and in some situations, it can be a mature thing to do and in other situations, it can be a naive thing to do. There's a lot of gray area between those and that sort of dynamic. It definitely influenced a lot of the themes on the album.
And on tracks from this album like "always, i'll care" and "not your friend," you touch a lot on change and transitions in your own life. How do you feel your life has changed since your breakout single "comethru" in 2018? Has it changed in ways you didn't necessarily expect?
Yeah, since "comethru" popped off in the U.S. and overseas—I don't know, I mean that happened as I was writing this next album. So, I guess the main thing that it did was instill me with a lot of confidence and trust in myself. It basically reaffirmed that I wasn't making this albumto, like, be heard. I wasn't writing this album to bring in more fans or to prove anyone anything. I was writing the album for myself, to make a project that I believed in and that I could fall in love with. I think the success of "comethru" put me in a place where I didn't have to worry about if people were going to like it or hear it. I just knew that I had to make the project that I wanted to make.
You detail and explain a lot of your songs on Genius. So why do you feel like it's important to give your listeners that level of context?
Just being a fan of music in general and in the context of my own life, it's always just really interesting to hear what the song means to the person who wrote it. You know, that sort of became like the truth behind song. So, it's just fun to, after a song's been out for awhile, to just let people know like where it came from and why it happened. I think context is really important to music. I mean, a lack of context can give people the freedom to take what they want from it. But the context—I think there's a lot of beauty and truth and honesty, and that's definitely something that I hold very close to music. So, I think context is important in that regard to me.
I really enjoy reading your blurbs about your process on Genius. Putting stuff up on there gives people the choice on whether they want to interpret it themselves or learn more about the artist's intentions. Obviously, your listeners will take away whatever they want from it, but what do you want people to take away when they listen to this album in particular?
I hope they feel comforted in the music—that listening to music makes them feel safe, and it makes them feel good, that they can always find solace, enjoyment and peace while listening to it. I also hope that there's some level of understanding—where the person listening has an understanding of the emotions that I'm feeling in that song and, vice versa, that the song understands what they're feeling. I hope there's some sort of a connection there.
I love that. When I was reading up on you, I learned that you got your pre-med degree before you decided to pursue music as a career once you realized you had a lot of traction and even record deal offers. Do you have any advice for other musicians who are thinking about making that leap?
Yeah, I would say being realistic is really important. I never really took the leap. Like, I always saw school and music as two very distinct things. And if you're in school and pursuing a reliable career, in my opinion, it's not worth it to drop out and pursue music full time without a realistic way to make income in between. Just because it's not hard to do both in the sense where like when you're starting out a music career and you're making music yourself, you don't need to spend time doing other things like going on tour. People are listening to your music, and that can all be achieved just by releasing music online. So you know, in my case, I started releasing music at the beginning of college, and I just kept releasing music on SoundCloud and Spotify while I was in college. After those four years, I had grown a pretty significant fan base, and my music career was waiting for me, and I didn't have to drop out. So, I just graduated and had two months after I graduated before I went on tour. I haven't looked back ever since. So, I think it's very, very doable to do both. And I did it, you know, with a hard major. I'm like a solid student, but I'm not an unbelievable student. I just made it happen.
What are you planning to do to connect with your fans now that your tour for the album has been postponed?
I think social media is the only thing I can really do—social media and live streams. I've been trying to be active and honest, trying to connect with people in a way that feels natural to me. It's just so hard when there's nothing too glamorous to share right now, and I think everyone's feeling a little weird. So I think it's just little moments. You can't really replace tour with anything, because there's nothing that compares to being on stage, singing music together with fans. But the closest thing is probably live streams, so I've been doing a couple of those and have a few more planned.
A lot of the tracks on this album sound like they're about or inspired by particular people in your life. Do you think the people you wrote about know when they listen to a song if it's about them in particular?
There's a lot of truth and honesty behind my music. So, everything is about a specific person or another. You know, there's Julia which is explicitly about this person named Julia obviously. Then "always, i'll care" about my friend Jamie, I sent the song to her after I wrote it. A few of the others are meant to be more anonymous. The people who they're about, some of them realize and some of them don't. I don't want to tell them, because I don't want to hurt anybody. But for the more meaningful songs that are more earnest and honest and I'm trying to express something to that person, they probably know that it's about them. But yeah, I mean that's what holds a lot of magic in my music—the fact that it's real.
