Damages: Part One – Jon Hadley

I’m so disinterested, disenfranchised, really… With the surface level. I’ve never made art, or written music for background noise or to go chasing the trend… and I definitely don’t give a damn about the algorithm. I write to build… I write to shatter… I write to burn things clean through…

I process the world in tangled webs instead of straight lines. It’s not enough to see the surface of a thing… I have to touch it’s core. I’m a native depth-first thinker and when something enters my field of attention I have to dig… until I find something… Only then am I interested in the complexity. I’m drawn to the patterns underneath the moment, underneath the the words and the social pleasantries that I have little use for.

I was born with an innate type of Synesthesia, which means my senses crossfire. A common example of this is Chromesthesia where people hear a sound a see a color. I experience this as well… and so much more. The world is layered for me just like my music. Synesthetic input powers my perception of the world, I feel everything in layers. Grief tastes like copper and smells like yellow. Synesthesia powers my my memory. I don’t just remember, I reinhabit… I relive, with full sensory immersion.

I write in layers, weight… Color, texture, smell, flavor. When the music matches the sensory flavor I’m going for I stop and I let the FX glitch to a stop. That’s what creates those signature Hadley endings where everything just kind of falls apart in motion. Just like me. Just like the world around me… so many times.

Damages is not an album of love songs, it’s not an album of happy thoughts, it’s not a villain, a hero… It’s the echo of grief that doesn’t fade, but just… lingers underneath the surface always whispering. Each track is highly personal and follows the timeline of my C-PTSD recovery. A little stroll down memory lane watching the rot eat through the paint on the walls of happy things.

You don’t need to know everything about to me to understand where it comes from and if our life experience is not the same, that’s okay. There are annotations on the song lyrics pages that will help explain what’s being said if you don’t understand.

Welcome to Damages.