Jim enjoying a smoke in the backyard of our HQ in Avondale, Chicago. Photocredits: Sam Tucker @sammtucker_ on Instagram

This month we had the pleasure of sitting down with the genre bending musician, Jim The Kid (He/Him). We talked about travel, the history of music and where it is at today, and the many jobs he has worked, from oil rigs to working on the set of the TV show Empire. 

Jim started playing music seriously when he was twenty-two, as before that he would mostly play covers. A roommate of his actually inspired him to start making his own songs. The riffs his roommate played at the time challenged Jim to make his own music, and from that kernel of inspiration he has now been an active musician for the last ten years and has released two of his own albums, Bar Flies and Orange Juice, as well as the single “Surfers Here.” 

Jim was born in Norwood Park, a neighborhood of Chicago, but in second grade he and his family moved to a farm in Harvard, Illinois. At eighteen, Jim left the farm life to come back to Chicago where he attended school at Flashpoint studying sound for film. That moment is when he says he began to play music seriously. Jim talks about his love for living on a farm though, and how he and his wife, Nikalette, eventually want to move back to one. “We raised chickens as kids,” he says. “We had horses, it was awesome. I still really love animals, and it was just amazing. It’s tough because I love the city so much, but over COVID we moved back to  Nikalette’s family farm for two years and it just reminded me how much I loved that life.” 

This two year move had a major impact on Jim, as did the pandemic (as it did to everyone.) “I was working on Empire at the time and we were living in this basement apartment off of Paulina and Lawrence. We were like ‘what the fuck is going on?’ so I asked my wife if we could go live on her family’s farm in Indiana, because what were we doing here?” To escape the pandemic and find some peace, Jim and Nikalette traveled to her farm in Indiana and lived there for two years. Here, Jim recorded his album Orange Juice. 

On their return, Jim has now been trying to find a balance between the rural life he craves and the city life he loves. From going to see movies regularly, to enjoying the Chicago art scene, Jim definitely has found a place to rest his heart within the city limits of Chicago away from the farm. While he wants to go back to the country, leaving the arts culture in Chicago is something he doesn’t want to do quite yet either. “You can be serious about the arts here,” he explains. “It’s harder to do that in a small town.”

“The Chicago art scene is really close knit,” he continues to explain. “It took me a while to find my place in it, but you do. There’s something for everyone. There’s an emo scene, a hip hop scene, a trap scene. Blues, garage rock. I mean, you can find everything in Chicago and everyone is cool as fuck. You can go to a show and everyone is so nice. Everyone is just so open.”

Furthermore, Chicago is known for its collaborative nature, something Jim has experienced regularly. On top of his own solo career, he plays drums for a new band being formed by Tyler and Ari from The Laughing Hearts, and has been invited and helped with drums in other bands and solo acts around the city. “It’s just super open,” Jim reiterates. “There’s not a negative energy of competitiveness. There’s some competitiveness, sure, but that’s good. It never shows in a negative way though. No one is hoping for someone else’s downfall. They all want good things.” 

Music has evolved quite a bit, and currently lots of interesting and unique music is coming out of Chicago to much acclaim. I asked Jim what he thought about that. “Well, old timers will say that, like, the ‘70s were the best time for music,” he says with a wistful grin. “But I think we’re living in the best time for it right now.  We have all this music at our fingertips we can listen to and be inspired by. You can see these bands across the world that bands back then wouldn’t be able to know about. Obviously there’s a lot of shit about the Internet, but there is good stuff too, especially for the arts, I think. It can challenge bands to jump to the next level. We can see other bands, and learn from them.”

“I’ve also noticed bands seem a lot more aware than they may have once been. People are more aware of the struggles of getting big and of fame, and also the perception others have of them. There’s a huge amount of global awareness, and learning from the past. It’s sick.”

Jim laughs at a joke said by Sam, our photographer PC: Sam Tucker @sammtucker_ on Instagram

Jim The Kid’s music walks many lines, being at times rock, indie, folk, and even post-punk. With his music steeped in so many different sounds, we asked Jim to name some of his influences. “The list just goes on and on,” he says. “I’m lucky to have parents that had an amazing vinyl collection. I grew up listening to The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and deep cut Jazz and Blues. My parents aren’t even musicians or anything, but they showed me music. I think my biggest influence though was just rawness, and that came from The Rolling Stones. They’re raw, you know? I would listen to their music and the tape warble. That’s when the tape is passing the heads and the speed changes just a little bit so there’s this little warble. I didn’t have the Internet until I was eighteen, so I had no way of knowing about this, but I learned music by ear and I wanted to get this sound. Once I got to college and started playing songs, I kept trying to create that sound. Then I read Keith Richards talking about the making of Exile On Main Street and found out that they only used tape, and I went down this wormhole of how to record on tape and what you can do with tapes. I realized the charm of The Rolling Stones and those early bands is imperfection. It makes it human.” For lyrics, Jim says Bob Dylan and Lou Reed are some of his biggest influences due to the way they can craft a story, something he does exceptionally well in his own songs.

“From there, it was Tim Presley with White Fence,” he continues. “I was reading about Tim Presley and how he would write a song. He would turn his phone off and just work all day until he finished a song. I was like ‘wow, that’s badass’ and have tried to adopt that methodology.” And, from our point of view at Raging Opossum Press, Jim has adopted that method of songwriting to great success.

Jim shows us his mean face. PC: Sam Tucker @sammtucker_ on Instagram

With Jim’s songs that exist outside of our genre naming conventions, I had to ask him what goes into his songwriting process. “I kind of torture myself until I complete the song,” he says with a laugh. “I record all my songs on my own. I like to have my own headspace. Though, really, it’s all over place. For Orange Juice, during Covid and on the farm, I had my drums just set up in this attic, and I would just play drums all day. If I find a beat that’s cool, I’ll just record that. Sometimes I’ll just hum over it too. On ‘Surfers Here,’ you hear the beginning, the ba-bada-ba-bada, that was just me figuring out the song. It’ll just balloon into this thing that’s so big. The best songs I’ve done, in my opinion, are the songs that just come out of nowhere. You kinda turn into an antenna. Jack White said that. That happens on the good days.”

“The lyrics are the hard part for me. I will just write down stories. Bar Flies was about when I worked on oil rigs in North Dakota, and that was all about just personal experiences. I like to project myself as a happy person, but I get sad like anyone else and I get really nostalgic. Some songs from Bar Flies are about old friends of mine. The song ‘Cerrado’ is about my friend Ian who joined the army. I was supposed to too, this was back in 2009, and luckily I didn’t make it. I got kicked out of Future Soldiers because I was, well, doing drugs. It was a hard time, and obviously my family was super disappointed in me, but now we’re all thankful because I didn’t have to go off to war. Ian though went out there, and he had a really rough time. He still has a lot of problems from his experiences, so I wrote a song about it. I like writing songs about things and emotions I feel strongly about. You can still write fun songs with lyrics that just sound nice though, they’re fun!”

“Smiley Smile by The Beach Boys is another huge influence on me and my songwriting. It’s like a collage. It’s experimental and fun, and I just like to listen to it. Having fun is just so important.” 

Jim lets it rip while playing Sleeping Village PC: Sam Tucker @sammtucker_ on Instagram

Jim also finds a lot of inspiration to his songwriting in the sounds of the worlds. A sound he may encounter naturally on a walk home may force him to start thinking of its sonic composition, spiraling him into writing a whole song inspired by that sound. An example of this is his song “Vendedores” from Orange Juice. “I was in a total rut,” he says. “I started running up the stairs to get some sort of energy out.” Becoming fascinated by the noise emitting from his feet hitting the hollow stairs, Jim recorded it and used it as the beginning of the song. “Then I’m saying ‘sin ánimo, pastillas sin ánimo esquinas,’ which is basically like having no motivation and bringing up pills and street corners. The album is about Nicaragua, where I lived for six months, and I wrote that because we used to take [Tramadol] while drinking on our sidewalk and there would always be civilian police on these corners.”

Jim’s time spent in Nicaragua was very influential to his music, but how he got there and what he was doing there is a bit of a story of missed connections. “I was there teaching English,” he explains. “We went to TEFL, which allows you to get your certification to teach English around the globe. There’s better places to go, like in Asia where they pay you super well for it and may even give you free housing. I had been practicing Spanish for a long time though and had been fascinated with Central and South America, and wanted to go to Colombia or Argentina, but it was just too expensive. Nicaragua was a great alternative.  They supposedly had teaching jobs there, but they totally didn’t so I ended up teaching kids in China English over Zoom from Nicaragua.”

“It was really cool though. We ended up staying in this hostel for, like, $30 a month with a bunch of people from all over the world. We traveled around a lot, and got to see a whole new perspective and met so many people.” The influence is apparent throughout Jim’s album Orange Juice as he talks about his experience throughout it. “We did a lot of surfing down there too.”

It should be no surprise then that one of Jim The Kid’s most popular songs, “Surfers Here,” is all about surfing in Nicaragua. “The surfers down there were really fucking good,” Jim explained. “And they’re, like, ten to twenty year olds. Catholicism is pressed so hard down there too, and the mindset to marijuana is so crazy. It’s like you’re in the ‘50s. The kids down there didn’t go to school, that’s why we didn’t have teaching jobs. I tried to write about all those different perspectives in the song.”

With Orange Juice having such a story to its creation, I was curious about what the story was for Jim’s first album, Bar Flies. We’ve covered that it was inspired by his time working on oil rigs, as well as some songs covering his nostalgia and friends, but I wanted to know more of the process behind the making of his album that features one of his most popular songs, “The 701.” 

“I decided I wanted to make a full album,” Jim explains. “Once I said that, I had to do it. It’s just how I am. I would do things differently with the recording process of some of those songs now, but I don’t regret it at all. That’s how it is, that’s how it's going to say.”

“I rented this room in Fort Knox,” he continues. “I brought my drums in there. I didn’t have any diffusion, which dampens the walls, but I was like ‘I have an idea,’ so I bought all these moving boxes and set them up everywhere to get the diffusion. Then I recorded the drums there.” Some of the recordings happened in stranger places though. Working as a caterer on the set of Empire, Jim recorded the piano for his song “Instant Rice” on their on-set piano as he trudged through the long hours of a catering shift. “[Catering] takes a toll on you,” he says with a laugh and a sigh. “Yet, [with songs] sometimes it just hits you. Sometimes it just works out like that. I just had the piano, recorded that, and then brought that into the studio with the drums and did lyrics last.” 

Jim walks to Walgreens. PC: Sam Tucker @sammtucker_ on Instagram 

“That song is actually about this dude who fell from the derricks while oil drilling, and you know the derricks are up in the sky and you’re drilling them down. You’re on a lanyard and you’re drilling these big pillars in the ground and you hold on to this rope, and he fell from the derricks. His name was Sam actually! There’s a lyric in that song which is like ‘I was thinking of you when he was swinging from the sky,’ because he was attached to this lanyard as he fell. It was like three in the morning. Yeah, that was pretty intense. Oh, and then I always made instant rice because I had no culinary ability. I would always just bring instant white rice to work. I don’t know how I survived off of that.”

Where did the oil rigs come from in the life of Jim The Kid? “Well, right after high school, basically,” he says. “I had graduated high school and just gotten kicked out of the army, so I had to do something. Had to make some money. I felt like I owed something to my family after the whole drug thing. A few of my friends in high school would go north to work on the oil rigs in North Dakota. They would go up there on their bikes for a few months and come back talking about all the money you can make up there. It’s hard labor, but good money. So, that’s what I did. Went up there, made some good money, and then spent it all on college. Now it’s all gone.” Jim laughs here. “It’s funny though, I didn’t write about the oil rigs until, like, eight years later. I wanted to write a folk-rock album when I decided to write Bar Flies, and just wrote about my past. That’s kind of what I always write about. The further back it goes, the more nostalgic it can get and the more feelings you can get out of it.”

The band screams, the Hotdog Bandit stares wistfully into the crowd. PC: Sam Tucker @sammtucker_ on Instagram

For the recording of Orange Juice, Jim got a drum machine. “I was recording with a metronome before,” he says. “And it sucks! There’s no life to it at all. Just dew-dew-dew-dew-dew-dew. It used to trip me up too much, so I got a drum machine. Beach House, who I love, uses a drum machine too so I got the same ones they used.” Orange Juice was all recorded at Nikalette’s family’s farm in Indiana during Covid. Jim would go into the attic, which he describes as a whole second floor, and it gave him more freedom to experiment with the drums than he had for Bar Flies. He was also able to use a real piano for Orange Juice consistently, as opposed to using Empire’s. 

Jim eats our opossum PC: Sam Tucker @sammtucker_ on Instagram

The song “Orange Juice” from the album is also one of Jim’s most popular songs. “In my opinion, it’s lyrically the best from the album,” he says. “”They’re all just…legit. This dude who lived next to us in Nicaragua would always blast Joel Osteen, which was crazy to hear. He would blast it on Sundays, and somewhere in that song I mention sitting down for the sermon as if we were there. All the lyrics are just kind of dry and to the point with the experiences I lived.”

With Bar Flies and Orange Juice already out and in rotation, Jim now plans to release his junior album, Bill’s Wrecker Service, come January. “This one is a bit different than my previous ones,” he explains. Bar Flies is about his time working on oil rigs and his friends, and Orange Juice is about his time in Nicaragua, but for Bill’s Wrecker Service Jim takes a different approach. “I didn’t know what to write about with this one, which makes it different from the other two. I just had a lot of melodies in my head. I thought ‘What can I write different time? I’m kind of out of stories.’ I watched this series of movies by this writer and director Les Blank. He does a docuseries on Louisiana, and it’s just really cool cinematography and about how life is down there. We had taken a road trip [to Louisiana],, going to Lafayette and New Orleans. I was channeling the energy of these Les Blank movies and our road trip, and doing research on the area when I came across this series of murders that took place in Jeff Davis County, it was called the Jeff Davis Eight, in Jennings, Louisiana. Well, so, I created this fictional character named Boyce Delles and he lives in that community and is directly affected by these murders that actually took place. The Jeff Davis Eight were the murders of eight sex workers, supposedly by the police for witnessing them murder someone in Jennings. No one knows for sure though, and it’s still a mystery. I wanted to try to write about it from their perspective too. Furthermore, this book Hurricane Season which is super scary and has been inspiring me to write something more in the vein of a murder mystery. It’s all about superstition in Mexico, so I tied that in because it goes into the whole scary thing I’m trying to do with this album.” Bill’s Wrecker Service follows the stories of the eight sex workers and Boyce Delles as he tries to find who murdered them. 

Bill’s Wrecker Service utilizes much more synthesizer than Jim’s previous albums. “Not to diss the other stuff I’ve done, I eventually want to go do a whole country album,” he says when asked about the change. “But I’m just more comfortable with my creativity and I’m trying to be more fearless. I got a synthesizer, that’s cool. I got a new drum machine too. I just have new tools at my disposal.” Both of these have led Jim to challenge himself to work in a genre he hasn;t before.

Where Jim’s first album was recorded in Fort Knox, and his second at Nikalette’s farm in Indiana, this one has all been recorded from the home turf; all within the walls of he and Nikalette’s apartment in Chicago. Jim’s  been approaching the recording of this album in a new way too. “I’ve been recording the drums straight to this cassette deck,” he says. “I then slow the motor down so the beat gets super gritty and almost industrial sounding, then I record the rest of the instruments on that beat. The cassette has been a huge part of the new project” With a new story and new tools, Jim The Kid is ready to wow audiences with the darkness of his newest album Bill’s Wrecker Service come January. 

As we like to do, we asked Jim what kind of element he would be if he were one. “Well, I’d like to say fire because fire is cool,” he said. “But I think I’d be water. I like to be by bodies of water, especially the ocean. If I could choose, I’d say I’m salt water. Man, now I want to go take a dip!”

Another question we always ask artists is how can people best support them. “Bandcamp,” Jim says. “I love Bandcamp. You can also buy merch on there. It’s sick, I love it. You can find more obscure stuff on it too.” 

Jim grabs a PBR from the fridge in the Sleeping Village green room after the show. PC: Sam Tucker @sammtucker_ on Instagram

Many musicians have a pre show ritual they take part in to ease their stage fright and prepare them for a performance. Jim was quick to answer for what was his. “I watch Kill Bill 2,” he says. “I fucking love Kill Bill. I love Uma Therman, and the soundtrack is amazing.” 

Jim’s readies for the next song at Sleeping Village PC: Sam Tucker @sammtucker_ on Instagram

The final question I had for Jim was about the infamous bits he does on stage, his most notorious one being the Hotdog Bandit. Jim explained how the bit started; “Me and this dude Sean at work called ourselves the hotdog bandits because we would bring in raw hot dogs and hide them around filming locations [on Empire],” he explains. “Then I put that as my title on Instagram and my bassist got the idea to evolve it more into the band a whole stage bit.” Now, at a Jim The Kid show, you can not only be stunned by the incredible music, but also find yourself laughing your ass off as he and the rest of the band pull various skits and bits around the stage.

Bill’s Wrecker Service will be available on all streaming platforms by January. Until then, you can follow Jim on Instagram at @jim_thekid to keep up to date on all things shows, releases, and anything else.  

Jim with the opossum at Raging Opossum HQ. PC Sam Tucker @sammtucker_ on Instagram

By Samuel Plauché

Founder, Chief Editor, Journalist. For inquiries, reach out to sam.plauche on Instagram.

First Published May, 2024