The Jon D'Eaux Backstory (may be fictional)

"Jon D'Eaux" arrived at 2014 via a circuitous musical path. Most musicians enjoy their "career" in  music between the ages of 18 and 30. Some get lucky enough to stretch it to 40, but that's it. It is a rare and lucky few who can earn a living through music into their forties, fifties and beyond. I am certainly not one of those - music became a hobby years ago, when it became achingly apparent that the people making a living in the music business weren't the musicians. 

I had a degree of 'success' in my younger years, but left it all behind at a relatively young age. I didn't return to writing and recording - in any noticeable or public way - until over 20 years had passed.

A bit of success can leave a musician with a lot of guilt about commercializing their music. I don't really think that most musicians and songwriters are actually "artists" - I certainly never called myself that. Still, I had a tough time reconciling the balance between "art" and commerce - especially when I was trying to build a life (understanding, as I said before, that music rarely pays the bills throughout most musicians' lifetimes). 

The act of recording and releasing albums is fundamentally a commercial act. You can make all the arguments you can about creating a "record" of your musical art, but it won't keep happening unless you sell a few copies - patrons who ask only for creative return don't exist anymore. So, I didn't make any more records. I kept writing for fun, and I recorded for my own amusement, but I didn't pay commercial studios to record the work, and I released almost nothing - at least nothing under the "Jon D'Eaux" name, because that name itself is a commercial fabrication.

So the years passed, and suddenly this habit of writing and recording music had involved my children too. Kids make up songs all the time, and I started capturing the ideas, nurturing them, and we built finished songs from those golden ideas. I recorded the songs because that's how the kids enjoyed music the most - playing them live on a guitar is one thing, but it's easier to dance along when there's drums involved.

I was happy to keep the recordings to ourselves, but the kids thought it'd be fun to put the songs onto a CD for friends and family - and having copies available for strangers to buy struck them as even cooler. I was happy to sell the music, but I didn't want to sell the kids - and so "Jon D'Eaux" was reborn, alongside "the Sibling Rivals."

It's a weird creative collaboration - three very young kids and one grown-up who is just trying to please that audience of three.