Over the years, Chicago musician Jake Hawrylak has worn many hats in the music industry. He is the former “bass guy” for the video channel of REVERB.com (a popular site devoted to purchase of musical instruments) and is a frequently hired session/touring musician by local area artists such as Alicia Walter, Reno Cruz, and Claude. On Friday, December 1, he will release his debut solo album Who Else Were We Supposed to Become? under the moniker Maiden King.
The moniker is deeply personal to Hawrylak. In it, King references his mother’s maiden name as well as The Maiden King: The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine, the 1998 book by Robert Bly and Marion Woodman that his girlfriend gave him. He creates a lush and layered indie “reluctant” Americana sound that is inspired by Jungian archetypes and dualities as well as his own experiences.
“This is the first body of work I’ve released on my own and even though I wrote in bands in the past, this is also the first one that feels completely real,” says Hawrylak. “Every song is rooted in something I actually experienced, these are real memories that I’m recounting like dreams.”
Like his moniker, his entry in the Water Tower Sessions series is deeply personal. Hawrylak chose to film at Bim Bom Studios, a studio in Chicago he had recorded at in the past. He worked with local engineer Michael Macdonald a number of times collaborating on an EP for his good friend Reno Cruz.
“I’ve been a fan of his work since his Oshwa days and after rehearsing for an Alicia Walter show in 2022, I fell in love with the look of the space,” says Hawrylak. “Michael is also a phenomenal engineer and person, so it was a real dream working there. “
The building has a rich history prior to being used as a studio. It was formerly a Polish metal and punk dive bar. Hawrylak says the exterior of the studio “looks like someone took the excess metal off of Pritzker Pavilion and slapped it on the front of a bar.”
“[Michael] and his partner Amanda (a brilliant dancer/movement artist www.amandamaraist.com) bought it during the pandemic and completely renovated the space to function as a studio/dance/open space. It’s in Hermosa on the 5200 block of Belmont and sticks out like a well-manicured thumb.”
Prior to being used for the session, Hawrylak used the videos of the songs for booking purposes and as a means of shooting for some bigger grants for tour money and the like.”
“I think having it serve multiple purposes like that helped me to focus on the logistics and performance and take some of the usual pressures off,” he says. “If anything comes of this, I hope this shoot serves as the jumping off point of the next chapter of this project where the music lives in front of people and is no longer hiding away on my laptop.”
The filming of the session’s songs also came at the right moment for him as he was coming off of one of the most stressful months of his musical life. He was chasing a deadline on the first record he was producing at his studio, Space Cowboy, and watched helplessly as the gear he invested in over the years fall apart. He was also getting over an “awful” cold and maybe against his better judgment decided to “persist” and go ahead with the shoot anyway.
“I’m glad we did because I think a lot of the stress I was working through helped me find my footing to play the music like we were at a show,” says Hawrylak. “It can be hard doing these kinds of shoots without an audience because things can feel pretty clinical in the room – guitar amps were in the basement, for instance – so there’s not a lot of energy to go off besides what you drum up on your own. But I love my band and love how these turned out.”
For the session, he and his band performed “Young Country, “Free, and “Footprints.” The first two were chosen as they are the album’s first singles and he “wanted to have some strong performances to show that we can pretty much sound like the record.” “Footprints” was chosen because the “live arrangement really brings the song to life” for him in “a different way” and he loves the “slow burn of it all.”
“I’m really proud of how all this music has come together because so much of the record was me producing and piecemealing things pretty independently,” Hawrylak says. “The songs were always produced with the live band in mind and so it’s been pretty rewarding and surreal to see how well things translate.”
“This session was a way for me to set the sound of this era of the group in stone,” he continues. “To capture the feel and energy of these players playing this music at their best.”
Hawrylak’s favorite moment was getting to perform “Free” in its entirety.
“There was such a rising energy going into that last section where we all kind of knew we had the take and that the explosion at the end was just going to be a moment for us to ride the wave together,” he says.
Scummy Water Tower caught up with Hawrylak to discuss the origins of Maiden King, what makes it unique compared to his other projects and why he feels failure is necessary on the path to achieve great things.
How would you describe the band’s sound? What makes it unique?
The sound is very much a “reluctant Americana” kind of vibe, at least right now. Nearly every song on the record was written by me on guitar sitting either in my room, on my porch, or on my roof. Intricate fingerstyle guitar has always been a kind of “home” to me and so that’s why so much of the sound leans in that direction. We’ve also got a lap steel guitar, and I majored in upright bass in college so there’s your Americana.
The “reluctant” part of it is because I really tried to produce these songs in a way that went beyond the “three chords and the truth” kind of stylings I commonly associate with that genre. I like to tell stories, and I like harmony that’s colorful but direct… but I also love music that is questioning and uncertain, music that allows itself to have slow stretches of ambience, music that allows itself to fall apart and not necessarily come back together. These aren’t necessarily sounds I typically associate with Americana, hence the reluctant part.
How would you describe the band’s chemistry?
The chemistry of the band is such a source of comfort for me. Our guitarist, Sebastian Espeset, has been one of my best friends since middle school and he’s been an absolute rock in translating a lot of my guitar parts and general ambience to the live thing. Our other guitarist/lap steel wunderkind, Sam Genualdi, is an absolute wizard who is super flexible shredding tasteful solos or well thought out parts. Sam Subar, our drummer, has the thing I value most in a drummer: a deep background and respect for jazz with an ear for proper songs and how to lock in in a simpler, more understated kind of way. Ivan Pyzow, our trumpet/keys player is the secret extra sauce on so many of these songs, always willing to get weird and improvisatory while still serving the music at large. He’s also a part-time choral director so he helps keep the harmonies honest.
How did the band form?
The band formed when I asked each one of the players to help bring the record to life. One of the odd blessings about the pandemic was being given the time and space to actually sit and learn to produce/record at home. Our first song, “echo”, was a result of this experimentation. But after amassing some 25 other tunes, I slowly took up the laborious task of whittling them down to the ten that fit on the record. Then, these other musicians were just great buds of mine who were around and willing to help bring things to life. Our first show proper was at the Red Room in Wicker Park, a venue my studio mate, Joe Shadid, has been running for the better part of a decade. It was a fun “proof of concept” for the live thing in a super receptive space while we were still finishing tracking on the record proper.
The name Maiden King was inspired by your mother’s maiden name and also a book by Robert Bly and Marion Woodman. How did those things inspire you personally and musically? What about that Jungian type of philosophy connected with you?
I spent a couple of years at the tail end of my 20s reading that stuff and applying it in a therapeutic process of my own. I first studied Jung in college in a roundabout way as part of the Religious Studies minor I had. The class was called “Freud, Jung and Religion” and was about a lot of the overlap between spirituality, therapy, and general religious practice and I was really moved by the notion that Jung didn’t ever give up on the idea of God… inner and outer. There’s a kind of humility there that really speaks to me and took me by surprise as someone who (at the time) was leaning pretty atheist/agnostic. Jung had a deep respect and reverence for religious practice as a means of opening people up to higher potentials in themselves and as a well-versed multi-instrumentalist, the idea of taking something you do everyday in the name of growth and calling it a “ritual” was very powerful.
Something that’s evolved out of the Jungian thing that has become more prominent in thinkers like Bly, Woodman and James Hilman is this idea of telling your own story and really dressing things up in a “fairy tale” kind of way. Kind of like looking at a memory as if you dreamt it. There’s something about the act of flipping the narrative like that that puts you in your own story in an actionable kind of way. So much of the writing process of this record was about doing that kind of work. This is the first body of work I’ve released on my own and even though I wrote in bands in the past, this is also the first one that feels completely real. Every song is rooted in something I actually experienced, these are real memories that I’m recounting like dreams. There’s an emotional weight you can bring to the most mundane things in retelling something like a myth. “Getting high by yourself for the first time” doesn’t hold the same weight as “first moment of palpable derealization.”
Your girlfriend, who is a therapist, gave you the book and inspired the band name. How did that come about?
My partner has been a therapist since just before the pandemic hit and with that abundance of time has started playing the guitar and writing songs of her own under the name “Odd Blessings.” We actually collaborated on a cover for one of the other bands I’m in, Sunjacket, for a remix LP they did this past summer. She was working on a song titled “The Maiden King” that was about some of the themes in that book and I’m a little sheepish to say that I had a “wait a sec” moment when we were first talking about it all. She was very playful in letting me take the moniker that was 100% born from her own artistic practice and meditations.
What themes did you want to convey on the album?
The biggest overarching theme for me was acceptance. Accepting the things you can’t change, accepting what is actually in your control, and accepting the fact that when you lay your whole life out before your eyes and take stock of everything, there’s a certain sense of inevitability that comes in seeing who you are today. The title, “Who Else Were We Supposed to Become?” was a line in the bridge to the song “Glory.” The whole song is about looking back on the wistful, rambunctious, and irresponsible years of my early 20s with a sense of compassion and understanding. You make a lot of messes in your 20s, especially early on, but the more I realized that those messes were part of the smelting process that makes us more human, the more accepting and open I became to them. I wanted this to be the title because I felt like it was both completely earnest and tongue and cheek. This balance of levity and severity was something I wanted to carry throughout all the songs. Kind of like the feeling of crying so hard you start laughing.
What song or songs most influenced the lyrical and sonic direction of the album?
“Erosion” was the first song I demoed that made me realize I was making this particular record. The song started out as a campfire jam with a super lame, John Mayer-esque, string slap on 2 and 4 thing and I couldn’t seem to figure out what it wanted to be. Once I got away from the guitar part and started playing with percussive layers I realized that this was something I could do for all the songs that seemed to just be me and a guitar. My biggest musical inspiration for the past 5+ years without a doubt is Blake Mills. He has such a way of making wild, otherworldly sounds that still feel like something you can hold in your hands. There’s a real sense of human touch/technical ability that I really admire that helps me remember that music for me has always been something I play with my hands. I had a bunch of noise makers and ambient machines I was amassing at the time that I sold toward the recording costs. The overall rule was getting rid of anything that didn’t feel interactive or played, so no drum machines or computer fuckery, all the weird noises that ended up had to be “played” in some way. This made the process of making some of the wilder sounds (like the ending of “One Days”) a fun challenge because it meant getting even weirder while knowing that the sounds were made in the room.
Lyrically, I was super influenced by the first Christian Lee Hutson record as well as a lot of Paul Simon and Gabriel Kahane. I like storytellers who tell it to you straight, but include a couple asides to clue you in on how they felt. But I’m also just as inspired by Grizzly Bear, Bon Iver, and Radiohead and that kind of dreamy sort of lyricism. But on the whole I wanted most of the music to come back to something very narrative driven.
What songs surprised you most?
The recording process for “Shelter” was one of my favorite moments on the record. I went into the studio thinking that it would be a quick “brush on the snare” kind of vibe and it was pretty apparent once we had everything mic’d up that that was not going to work like it did in the demos. Stephen Shirk (owner of Shirk Studios, also engineered, mixed, and co-produced the record with me) had the brilliant idea to try to break up the drums into a mallet kind of thing on the toms with a kick mic and room mic way in the back of his space. Then we stuck the snare in front of this Gibson Falcon amp he has with a really nice trem and I clapped books together into a 57 running into that amp while the same room mic picked it all up. It was such a fun moment and completely transformed the song for me. It put the drums in the same dreamy kind of space the lyrics and melody were chasing and I’m so proud of the end result.
Besides that one, “Footprints” was another surprise. The song was the oldest of the tunes and existed for years as something closer to where that third verse ends up. I was really bored with that kind of “sad singer songwriter” strum and was about ready to ditch the song, but my girlfriend kept coming to bat for it. I tried slowing everything down and ditching the strum entirely and it completely opened the thing up. The slower tempo let me feel the groove more and focus more on making the guitars and bass distinct voices around the melody. I feel like the emotional weight of that last verse is deepened too because the strumming feels more tender after all that came before.
Truth be told, there aren’t any songs besides “Tangible” and “Free” that ended up where I thought they would. Even “Glory” was written on the piano. So much of the process of making this was giving myself the space to “unstick” the songs and get away from how they felt to play solo. It’s been pretty wild to seem them translate again from the recordings to the live show.
You’re also a freelance-based producer, engineer, musician, and film scorer. Why’s it important to have an eclectic resume? What are some of the biggest things you learned? How have those experiences most influenced the music on this album?
I’m not sure whether it’s important or not to have an eclectic resume… sometimes it’s just a lot more work. I think for me it was a result of getting bored by the same things pretty easily and not wanting to stagnate. The hard reality about being a musician is that this work requires a lot of money to do at a high level and it doesn’t really ever compensate you in kind as a result. So a lot of my eclecticism has just come from a combination of my interests intersecting with some creative ways to make some money here and there.
All that being said, I’m grateful as hell for the ride and have learned a far bit along the way. Besides the usual “show up on time,” “be good,” “dress for the job you want,” etc. type platitudes, one of the biggest things I’ve learned is about the inevitability of failure. When I was growing up a lot of the educational regard for mistakes as we clawed our way towards college and the like was a “you only get one shot so don’t mess it up” kind of mentality. Now as I teach I notice in some of my younger students this sense that it’s evolved into a “well mistakes happen but still don’t mess up” sentiment. The reality for me is that failures and mistakes are more than just an inevitability, they are a necessity for doing anything worth doing at a high level.
I tried to make this record about 2 times, with a second unrelated record sitting somewhere in between those first two attempts. I flew to NYC for nearly two weeks to lay the groundwork for what was supposed to be this first record mine. All of these projects got scrapped. The more I pressed on with some of these older songs and ideas I had that I was trying to force into a debut, the more I came to resent those songs, myself, and the process as a whole. But the funniest thing happened when I gave in to giving up on all those songs, the songs that I wanted to make… the songs I felt like I needed to make, were suddenly just there. Most of the explosive periods of creativity around making this music came in flashes after giving up on some dead end I had been chasing. Sometimes it was a lyric, sometimes the arrangement, the genesis of it came from giving up on old songs and not feeling the need to treat every little idea of mine as something sacred. So, my only lasting, lived advice from all this is to fully embrace the potential for transformation that is inherent in any failures we really let in.
Joshua is co-founder of Scummy Water Tower. He’s freelanced for a variety of newspapers, magazines, and websites, including: Rolling Stone, The Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, Guitar World, MTV News, Grammy.com, Chicago Magazine, Milwaukee Magazine, MKE Lifestyle, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, A.V. Club, SPIN, Alternative Press, Under the Radar, Paste, PopMatters, American Songwriter, and Relix. You can email him at josh@scummywatertower.com.
