Upclose with Pretty Boy Jones

HK Magazine: As a kid, you were already into soul and blues. Why not NKOTB, like normal kids?
Pretty Boy Jones: I was totally sheltered from the radio! We moved a lot, to places where there was maybe a handful of kids at school who didn’t listen to country and I’d be one of them. I had no choice but to raid my dad's old records.

HK: I read you dropped out of college to be a DJ.
PBJ: Oh no! No, I didn’t drop out, I just used the money my parents gave me to buy books in freshman year to buy DJ equipment instead. I was a sociology and psychology major; I did graduate!

HK: As a producer, you must know what makes a cheesy track.
PBJ: Cheesy can be good. It’s a very fine line. Now it’s getting more so that you can play more commercial, sort of cheesy tracks and people are digging it a bit more. It’s become a good thing to drop really bad songs, play it like you’re being ironic...

HK: How do you play crap ironically?
PBJ: The key to playing a cheesy song is you’ve got to make it your own. You can’t just drop it; you have to create your own remix. You want to make it original. Catch them with the “everyone knows it” song, but give it a different beat, or different a capellas. You have to go in and out of what people know and don’t know, and that’s how you open doors to something they’ve never heard before. Take them out there then bring ‘em back with something they know.

HK: People keep saying MySpace is “the” musicians website. How much impact have you noticed it having on the music scene?
PBJ: You can’t say it’s not making waves in getting music out there. But it’s certainly not the end-all be-all way of discovering new bands. It’s just the easy way. People can portray themselves however they want, so you have to be a little careful. It has turned out to be one way of networking and getting music out there. I have a page, but it’s not one of my favorite ways to get out there. I prefer playing live.