Today we’d like to introduce you to Justin Jackley
Hi Justin, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
Hello and thank you. I’m a local artist, graphic designer, and teacher originally from San Antonio and currently living on the outskirts of Austin. I’m a full-time art teacher and artist but one of my main gigs right now is running the design department for an Austin-based micro record label called Herby Records. We started up a few years ago when a friend of mine and local audiophile, Frank Herbertson, asked me if I wanted to help him launch a local record label. Knowing little to nothing about the process, I was rather hesitant, but he assured me I would be in charge of the art and promotional aspect of the project and he would deal more with the finances/sales, legalities, the musicians, and production. I agreed to help out as art and design is more in my comfort zone and I had already made well over 100 album covers for various clients and musicians. I’m a big fan and collector of vinyl and it also seemed like a good way to help promote my many musician friends both locally and internationally that could use a little more exposure. We named the label Herby Records after Frank’s nickname when he was in the service and we launched in late 2020 with a vinyl release of “Stoned Gypsy Wanderer” by A.J. Kaufmann – a young poet and musician in Poznań, Poland. We followed that with a 12″ EP release by the Mushroom Club – a psychedelic shoe-gaze band from Glasgow, Scotland. We would later team up with Psych9 Records out of Guatemala for some collaborative releases by the Strawberry Jam (UK) and Secular Pains (Toronto, Canada). We have since released over 60 records over the past 5 years with a long list of musicians both local to Austin and others across the US and from Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Scotland, the UK, Germany, Poland, Italy, Israel, and Japan with much more on the way. At this point, the goal is to reach 100 records by the year 2030 and call it quits.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It’s been mostly pretty smooth so far. We have had some minor obstacles though. Early on, we got ripped off by a lathe cut record cutter company called Lancaster Lathe Cuts. They pretty much just took payment for making records and then completely disappeared without making or delivering any product. I think Frank only lost four or five hundred dollars at the time but searching around online, it looks like a lot of other people had got taken by this guy and some lost upwards of $4000. Other than that, it’s just dealing with the postal service and problems with them. Especially when it comes to international shipping. You spend over $100 to ship some records to a participating musician for their cut and it’s floating around the world for 6 months and then gets returned to Austin and has to be re-shipped for another $100 or it just gets lost. We still have a package of 7″ records that were supposed to go to Brazil 6 or 7 months ago and it’s just plain missing and USPS won’t refund anything. I hope whoever ended up with that package enjoys sludge metal.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I’ve always been an artist. I studied painting at Texas State University and quickly realized that it would be an extremely difficult road to try and live solely as an artist. They don’t call them “starving artists” for nothing. I made the decision to combine my love of art, health insurance, and summer vacation and became an art teacher. I have been teaching High School art in various districts around Austin for the past 15 years. It really suits me. The pay is not great but I do enjoy teaching art techniques and art history to teenagers. It also allows me time to work on my own projects and set an example for my students. It’s also really nice to be off on nights, weekends, holidays, and for two months over the summer. I am currently working on my Master of Education degree and would like to teach at the university level in the future.
I kind of have a bad habit of taking on way too many projects at once. Aside from teaching full time, working on my M.Ed, and running all artistic aspects of Herby Records, I also contribute to the Cartoonism Artist Collective on a regular basis, participate in solo and group art exhibitions around the Austin area, and illustrate and conduct interviews for a music magazine out of Slovenia called It’s Psychedelic Baby Magazine. In a way, they are all related and currently feed back into Herby Records in a mad cross-promotional sort of way.
At this point, I would say that I am most known for my album covers for Herby Records as well as other covers I have designed for Psych9 Records, Via Kosmische, Taped Rugs Productions, Stone Premonitions, Ramble Records, and the Swamp to name a few. I think that I have a style that is almost instantly recognizable as my own. A lot, and I do mean a LOT, of artists that currently design album covers and posters tend to make the same style of artwork and it gets really tedious and generic looking. Especially as drawing tablets and digital color have become the norm with most of these artists. I constantly see album covers, mostly in the stoner and doom genre, that just rehash the same tired themes and images and ideas. So much artwork looks like it could have been created by any number of artists with interchangeable names. I like to think that I have some sort of uniqueness that makes me stand out from the other artists.
I am most proud of my work with Herby Records. I have made almost 70 album covers for them so far and will end up with at least 100 for them alone. I really enjoy working with them because I get to hear all of this obscure and weird music that few people have heard before and try to come up with some sort of a visual interpretation. I also really like to do handmade album covers for some of the small quantity editions using collage and block printing and/or screen-printing. This makes every copy of the record absolutely unique and special. Not many labels do that.
We’re always looking for the lessons that can be learned in any situation, including tragic ones like the Covid-19 crisis. Are there any lessons you’ve learned that you can share?
The pandemic was actually the factor that started everything going with Herby Records. We were a few months in to “lock down” when Frank first contacted me with the idea of starting a record label. During that time, most people had a lot of extra time to themselves to be alone, reflect, and in many cases, record a new album. So, it really made sense to do something collaborative with all of our newfound free time and a record label seemed to make perfect sense to bring people together. Most musicians have home recording equipment at this time, audio can easily be emailed, artwork can be scanned and emailed, records can be ordered and pressed and sent through the mail as well. More than a few releases on Herby Records could be considered ‘pandemic albums’. One of my favorite of those is a record by the Wolves of Saturn that was recorded in an abandoned WW2 bunker in a small village outside of Dresden, Germany. It really echoes that sense of isolation that many people were feeling.
Overall, I think the Covid-19 Crisis taught us which jobs actually are “essential” to keeping society running, that nobody really needs to be in an office to get work done, margaritas can be delivered, and art and music will always survive in the face of adversity.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://herbyrecords.bandcamp.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/herbyrecords/?hl=en
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@herbyrecords
Image Credits
n/a
