After the Damage
In October of 2025, Jonathan Hadley released his flagship Album, Damages. Damages was written during the height of his fight with childhood C-PTSD and the decades long depression that grew out of those experiences. It was a time of heavy redefinition and restructuring in his personal life.
Damages was written during what could be described as the final boss fight… Re-entering the crumbling ruins of his childhood home to find out if anything of his innocence was able to be salvaged. It couldn’t. Inside that house he found a younger version of himself he’d left behind… and all the scripting and masking finally fell away.
During the production of Damages, nothing seemed off because he was actively writing that version of himself back into existence… But when it was done… His sense of self collapsed. When you finally let all of the armor fall, you’re left with a blank slate and a decision about who you want to be now. That’s a lot harder than it sounds.
Scribble1, picks up two months after the release of Damages. Jonathan’s artistic drive, his ambition, all fell apart when the trauma scaffolding fell away. That left him emotionally blunted, artistically blunted, synesthetically2 blunted. All of the pathways and signals he used to orient himself in his body and his world were broken and the only thing that can fix that… is time. Over the next two months he took time time off from everything, including creative endeavors.
Slowly, as things learned to come back online without the constant adrenaline fueled chemistry left behind by C-PTSD, colors began to re-emerge. His internal soundtrack3 began to play again. These things can’t be rushed, or pushed ahead. They resolve in their own time, but slow re-exposure to the things you enjoy is beneficial.
This is where Scribble comes into play. Scribble is a collection of short tracks with no theme and no plan… Just Hadley scribbling himself back into the world.
Scribble: Coming January 2026
- The title scribble comes from Hadley himself. He often begins writing a song by scribbling pieces of ideas into the DAW and then structuring the soundscape around them. He is known for layered composition and sound design. All of it written by ear and feel. ↩︎
- Jon Hadley is a multi-modal synesthete. He uses his innate synesthesia to orient himself and test for cohesion of his logic and emotional states. ↩︎
- Music plays in Hadley’s head constantly alongside his internal monologue. It’s part of what drives him creatively. When that soundtrack is muted, it removes an aspect of what he uses to sense emotion itself. ↩︎
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