“That’s pretty much it; this album really is the long and short of what I’ve been up to,” Graham Jonson said while a smile ran over his face. He pushed his tortoise shell glasses up onto his nose as we sat with his statement, which just so happens to double as the title of his latest album.
This 21year-old Portland native, who is better known by the name of his musical project — quickly, quickly — just released his debut LP with the ever fitting name of “The Long and The Short of It.” Prior to the album’s late August release, it had been three years since any noise from Jonson. “The Long and The Short of It” is exactly what its namesake would suggest: a 40-minute highlight reel speaking on the progression of quickly, quickly’s growth as an artist.
In 2018, right before the new album came to be, Jonson made the move from the PNW to the City of Angels to test the waters in the biggest musical hub on the West Coast. While in Los Angeles, he finished the album — for the first time that is. He eventually made the move back to Portland, scrapping all the tracks besides three, and getting back to the drawing board to see how he could take it further into the direction he was aiming for. Though he didn’t end up making a permanent home there, this big move sparked new creative motives in Jonson — not just for the album, but for his project as a whole.
“Moving to LA was a big renaissance for me in a lot of ways,” he said. “I started listening to all the music I could during that time, trying to expand my scope. It was my first time really listening from a critical lens and trying to analyze song structure and breakdown.”
Although this is his first swing at a full length album, Jonson is no new face in the scene. To fully realize the shift of “The Long and The Short of It,” we have to look back at how Jonson found his initial footing in the world of lo-fi loops and beats. When the genre began to box him in, he began exploring past those limitations to piece together what he needed to cook up this new sound he is after.
“I was nervous. I’d never ventured down this road before, and I knew it was going to turn some people off,” he said. “I get really excited when I get some criticism because the shift was a somewhat polarizing thing.”
The universe set Jonson’s train rolling ages ago in the form of a nasty injury. Before rehashing the fateful tale that started it all, he warned me with a laugh that, although it sounds like a piece of Wikipedia lore, it’s the honest truth.
“Going into highschool, I broke my leg really badly while I was skateboarding,” Jonson said with a deep breath, still shaking off the chuckle. “I had planned to play soccer at school, but I couldn’t make it happen since I was in a full leg cast and bound to a wheelchair. I had gotten really into hip hop in middle school, but I didn’t really care about the rappers per say; the beats were what had me hooked. I couldn’t do anything I had lined up, so I decided to make the best of it. That’s when I started to hunker down and learn to make beats — that was when I really found my love for it.”
When most high school freshmen’s whole worlds’ revolved around Friday night football and a date to the homecoming dance, Jonson was unknowingly setting himself up for something that would eventually grab the ear of the Pitchfork staff member renowned music critic Anthony Fontano, and even our own most prestigious little school paper.
“The Long and The Short of It” strays away from anything Jonson has released in the past and proves to be worth the wait. There’s a maturity in this album that’s clear from the get-go. The album opens up with a track called “Phases” where a syncopated spoken word by Sharrif Simmons sits on top of what I can only describe as a rubix cube of sound. Here we have a great example of this LP’s complexity. Jonson presents a rarity in his production that can’t be done justice in a quick once over; it’s multidimensional without losing its intimate feeling.
This juxtaposition snowballs as we dive into his vocal performance throughout the album. He explained this was his first time singing on anything he has released as quickly, quickly and his intent was to use his voice as a tool on the tracks, not as the main focal point. Compared to what he’s released in the past, “The Long and The Short of It” flies and jumps all across an expansive space. The instrumentals are circular and play out like a vortex, while his voice acts as a stabilizer for everything going on around it. Jonson admits creating a set of songs with this focus was the most vulnerable part of recording the LP.
“It’s weird; it feels like I’m reverse engineering the process in a way,” he said. “I know how to form a structure, and I know how to produce it, but actually writing full formed songs and creating verse-chorus structure wasn’t really something I’d had a lot of practice in.”
Being seasoned on the production side of things, Jonson shared that lyric writing and the vocals themselves were the most challenging part of this operation, but retrospectively spilled that it was an ultra rewarding piece of the puzzle.
“Evolving is the only way you can expand and survive in this era,” Jonson said. “Right now is possibly the best time to make music; there are more resources now than there ever was before. I mean look,” he said as his shoulders sent his hands up in a shrug. “I created my entire career just posting beats to a free website. It’s anyone’s game; there’s just a whole new level of access that’s around now for us to take advantage of.”
The album gave a quick synopsis of the past three years in Jonson’s life — what he’d call the short of it I suppose. So, the long of it: the extended takes and extras of what went into this new LP, courtesy of a curious listener who was dead-set on knowing what went into the revamp of quickly, quickly’s sound.
