Today we’d like to introduce you to Jason Mori.
Hi Jason, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Hey, there, Austin; my name is Jason Mori. I have a small, very new artist promotion company, The Funky Janitor Presents ( https://
Credit: Hasbro
I’m here to ask you if you’d allow me to come to join you. Don’t worry, though. I plan on earning that invitation. I love this timing, so thank you so much, Voyage Austin, for reaching out to me because I’m just starting again.
My Austin origin story begins with a 1969 Dodge Dart Swinger road trip that needed its newly rebuilt engine broken in. In July 2001, I drove her to Austin to take a break from Silicon Valley and spent a week with the Austin team of Excite staff, where I worked. I spent that week in South Austin mostly, and I remember clearly how it felt like home right off the bat. There’s an undisclosed, off-the-beaten-path swimming hole west of Austin where I left my heart leaning up against a tree, and I had been in town only a few hours. I knew at some point then that I’d eventually make my way to Austin when the time was right, and after an Eagles-level vacation (17 years) from music, and a pandemic of the soul, in 2021, I finally felt like the time was right.
My life in music began to take shape in the Bay Area in 2003 after I left Silicon Valley and moved back to my hometown of Napa, CA. I’ll get to that, but it involves a local Austin artist you interviewed here in March of 2021, right before I came to Austin to see her band perform in June of that year. That artist is Noelle Hampton, and it was just after her band The Belle Sounds first show in a year and a half, at ACL 3Ten, opening for Johnnie Goudie, as I was walking up South Congress, that I decided that it was finally time.
Standing at the intersection of South Congress and Music Lane, on my way up to The Continental Club, a Daughtry song came on, “Traffic Light.” That post showed high still coursing through my soul, the fact that after almost 20 years, I finally got to meet Noelle, Mark Hallman of Congress House Studio, reconnect with Andre Moran, whom I had worked with back in 2003, and caught my first glimpse of Ray Prim, Emily Shirley, Jason Garcia and heard the incomparable Erica Michelle for the first time it felt like everything was ready, except me. I know how my last stint in music ended; would they accept me? Would they even care? “So this is how you’re going down?” Chris asks in “Traffic Light.”
I sat there at that intersection in a self-reflection. The song became a conversation with myself, and at the end, when I got up to head up South Congress to grab some Amy’s Ice Cream and loiter outside of The Continental Club, the question then became, how? What would I do this time? How could I help the artists I have come to love in Austin?
This is just the beginning of it. Like the Erica Michelle song “Long Way,” this is a new journey into the unknown, and I love that video because while by day I’m a janitor, when the night comes, I love to spend it listening to music and finding stories to tell so I can share it with you. Still, it will take some time to get it right. I’m in no rush; I’m still working on my storytelling and WordPress skills and will launch a podcast this summer. Once I have everything in place and operating smoothly, the opportunity to put my boots on the ground in Austin again will finally come.
A lyric from Noelle’s has stuck with me, and Belle Sounds’ “All About Love,” which has been my most important mantra going forward. “Don’t waste my time if you can’t do it.” I took that dare thanks to something Noelle said to me that night. Shh. Listen ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Can you talk to us about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Twenty years since my first visit, I can’t honestly describe how overwhelming that Friday, June 25th, 2021, was to be standing next to the people responsible for my favorite record of all time. I take full credit for the burnt bridges and life-altering train wrecks piled on top of the smoldering ashes of my former indie label Shoestring Angel Records. It started beautifully, and the music we released doesn’t show how crazy it got at times behind the scenes. It has been a long, rough, and sometimes brutal personal journey, but I was derailing myself looking back. In almost complete social isolation, it took a long time to come to terms with and make peace with myself and my actions. I took a risk in July of 2021 when I returned to Austin because I knew it would inspire me to get back into music, but I had yet to learn if I had any business doing that. Keep reading; we’ll get there.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I specialize in the Art of The Billy Fish. Walter Hill, Jimmy Iovine, Ry Cooder, and Diane Lane shaped my life very early. I was on the Universal Studios lot tour when they were shooting “Streets of Fire.” If you’ve seen that movie, the title of this piece makes sense. Billy Fish was the manager of Ellen Aim, a musician who’s come back home for a show after making it out. Between that, “Eddie and the Cruisers” (I’ve worked in radio, like Doc), and even “Crossroads” (Curtis Lawson was the one who said to me, “Son, blues ain’t nothin but feeling good about bad times), my artistic styling began to grow and form. By high school, I was a DJ on the local FM station where I grew up in Napa, KVYN, and followed suit into college radio at KCSC, the Livewire, CSU Chico’s FM-cable student-run station. Things happened, and I didn’t stay at college. That’s when I turned my focus to tech and took a step away from music for the first time. I found my way back in the summer of 1998 when I met a bluesman named Daniel Castro in San Francisco and his bass player, Kevin T. White. Some of you in Austin may have seen Kevin perform with Chuck Prophet and The Mission Express. Over time I became friends, then roommates with Kevin, and I leaned on him as I searched for a band to back the two artists I would eventually release EPs with through my indie label Shoestring Angel Records in 2004. I knew Mike Emerson from Daniel’s band as well, he’s now playing with Tommy Castro and The Painkillers, but I was going to need a drummer and a guitarist. Kevin and Michael recommended Andre Moran and Ricky Carter. The thing was, Kevin, Michael, Andre, and Ricky played as a backing band quite often for some amazing musicians. Beth Waters, Paige Heimsoth, Essence. Noelle (Kevin and Andre, at least). They were a tight group, and I trusted them with the compositions of the songs we gave them. They got charts and scratch acoustic demos; what you hear on the record is all of them. One track of Amber’s “Chaotic Sanctity”
was almost one take. It was amazing and, to be honest, critical to the success of the sound of those records because I had my hands full with my artists and myself. As a tribute, there’s a hidden track on the CD (on Soundcloud) that I put together from the “Chaotic Sanctity” session that’s a tribute to the boys. I managed to hold things together barely for a couple of years, but I finally had to step away in 2008 and reset. I’m proud of the music, and the things I accomplished, like helping start a local musicians guild in my hometown that led to a concert series called “Napa City Nights” that ran from 2008 until the summer of 2022 in a beautiful riverside amphitheater we helped get city approval by showing we could draw people there for the music, a memorable 4th of July performance in 2006 by that group in Downtown Napa for the city, some live radio broadcasts, and my favorite live recording. You can find the archives of some of my past work on my Soundcloud ( https://soundcloud.com/
That’s probably different from what I’ll be getting up to. I love working with new artists, and I love running sound for live shows, so we’ll see, but a little selfishly, I want to experience the music live as a fan more and then be a voice for it. I’m a music writer that hopes someday to be a good one, and if I’m lucky, a great one like Michael Corcoran, and I hope that translates into a good interviewer for my upcoming podcast over time. We’ll see this summer, and if that helps me find a slot at a radio station that plays local artists, I would happily volunteer my time for a Sunday night shift to recap that weekend’s music happenings.
Can you talk to us about the role of luck?
I was born under a bad sign. I can hear Albert King singing that right now. Albert is my favorite bluesman Daniel Castro’s favorite bluesman. I wouldn’t call it luck. I call it Mom. Where and whatever constitutes her out in the universe these days is lending me a helping hand. You can’t explain how the first three people I was introduced to once I was a part of the music profession as an indie label owner came into my life any other way. This article mentions them, but I’m always uncomfortable with the name-dropping thing.
For the rest of this story, join me on my Substack, I currently don’t charge for subscriptions, and you can read the full version of “The Art Of The Billy Fish” here: https://jasonmori.substack.
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