Fredericton musician Jordan Doucet said he writes songs, but he doesn’t call himself a singer-songwriter.
“I’m glad when I’m not considered a singer-songwriter. I kind of hate [the singer-songwriter label], especially on the East Coast it’s just way too overdone.”
Doucet, a second-year student at St. Thomas University, is majoring in Anthropology. But when it comes to what he wants to do with the rest of his life, he said that paying the bills by playing music is his answer.
“Ideally [music] could be what I would be supporting myself with and it’s obviously a long shot and a lot of people say that, but why not want that for myself. I might as well give it a go.”
Doucet’s latest EP, aptly titled Sin Summer, is a sweet but short collection of songs about love, heart break and summertime.
“If you listen to the EP, it’s pretty sappy. It’s clearly about some heartbroken loser who’s writing songs,” Doucet joked.
He picked up a guitar about seven years ago and has been working on several musical projects, but was glad and somewhat relieved to be able to release his latest collection of songs.
“This the main thing I’m doing. I also play in a band called the Arlens. But right now my main focus is my solo project. I just put out an EP last month and that was good. I had fun making it. It was a year’s worth of kind of picking it up and working at it. I would get motivated for like a week to do it and then put it on the shelf for a while. But it felt nice to put it out and I think it was pretty well received I guess.”
The five songs, which clock in at just around 12 minutes, are a confident depiction of Doucet’s growth as not only a songwriter but also as a producer and a musician. Sin Summer, which took almost a year to write and record, doesn’t have any clear standouts yet what’s admirable is that considering the amount time it took to complete Sin Summer, it sounds like a complete project.
It’s fair to say that the ever-improving 23-year-old has unique sound that is centred around his assertive low voice and interesting and unexpected chord progressions.
He cites several bands such as the Strokes and the Replacements as influences. The sound Doucet creates is hard to find in other songwriters and when asked with whom he thought he shared a similar sound, he cited good friend and Sin Summer’s co-producer Saint John musician David R. Elliott.
“The first two songs were produced by David R. We were both living in Saint John about a year ago now and he recorded them and did a really good job with them too. He really worked with the songs and did things that I wouldn’t have thought of, but at the same time it was exactly was I was looking for.”
Doucet’s relationship with music began at a young age. He began playing piano when he was seven and studied through the Royal Conservatory of Music for several years before he picked up a guitar. Since then he hasn’t really looked back, writing most of his songs on guitar. However, Doucet said he plans to have more piano-based songs for his next release.
For the moment, Doucet is focusing on two things: performing more shows and getting a band together.
“This summer is just going to be about playing shows, maybe I’ll go on tour. By the summer, I’d like to have a band backing me, just to fill out the sound. I don’t really write songs for just guitar. It would be nice to play some fuller sounding material.”
