By Tristan Weisenbach
Arts & Entertainment Editor
It was Jesse Moldovsky’s junior year of high school. While playing soccer — one of his biggest passions at the time — he sustained an injury and ended up stuck at home for most of the school year with a concussion. While he says it was a depressing time for him, it was also what inspired him to write his first-ever released song, “Hazel Eyes.”
Moldovsky, known professionally as jsolomon, has since traded his once-possible soccer career to pursue music full-time. Growing up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, jsolomon moved to Philadelphia briefly after high school before venturing to New York City.
While in high school, he and his mother would drive to Philadelphia every week so he could perform small shows at open mics across the city. What started out as a few songs here and there quickly snowballed to more notable performances.
“I started playing some small gigs, I became a part of the Philadelphia Folk Song Society and played some shows through that, and I played at the Philadelphia Folk Festival two years in a row,” jsolomon said in an interview with The Signal.
After living in Philadelphia for a year after high school, he moved to the Big Apple to pursue more music opportunities.
“I think at 18, I was a pretty young 18 and definitely did a lot of growing up quickly when I got to New York,” he said. “I can't imagine my life in any other way at this point.”
While he considers New York almost as much like home as Bucks County, he says it was tough living without a car. After four years there, he decided the next best step for him and his career was packing up and moving across the country to Los Angeles.
Since moving to LA, jsolomon has had the opportunity to meet with other musicians and experts in the industry and to explore his place both socially and professionally. His biggest long-term career goal as a musician is simply to have a music career.
“I want music to be my job for the rest of my life,” he said, “and that’s kind of the only goal.”
Jsolomon’s main instrument is the guitar, but he says he can typically figure out how to play most string instruments on his own. His style of music is “sitting somewhere between indie folk and alt rock and basement punk.”
As for artists that inspire him most, they’ve shifted over the years. When he was younger, he says his biggest role models were Jason Mraz and Jack Johnson. Throughout middle school, his music taste turned more towards Tyler, the Creator and Mac Miller. Today, however, his inspirations include Damien Rice, Bon Iver and The Strokes, among others.
While his musicianship has given him the opportunities to perform at many different venues across the country, he says his favorite performance was two years ago at Syracuse University.
“We played this outdoor show near this apartment complex, I think they called it ‘the cage’ or something because it was fenced in,” jsolomon said. “It was snowing outside, it was freezing cold and it was also a DIY show so the sound was terrible and everything, but it was such a fun experience.”
Despite having years of experience, jsolomon said he still gets nervous before every performance no matter how big or small it is. He doesn’t have a specific way that he prepares himself; he simply does nothing all day until the show, when he says the stage fright goes away.
He doesn’t currently have any upcoming performances planned, as he’s in “music creation mode” to make as much music as possible. However, he says he’d consider opportunities to perform if they arise.
Jsolomon has been working to group his newly written music into themes to be released sometime in the future.
“The release of it or the order or the grouping of it is kind of, at the moment, an afterthought,” he said. “I just have a lot of stuff that's written and I've just been getting it recorded.”
His latest single, “Trick,” released earlier this year, is currently available to stream on all platforms.
