For some artists, the spark for a record comes from a chord or a lyric. For Heartour’s Jason Young, it started with an image: Three album covers sketched in a notebook before a single bar had been written. This approach is not unusual for Young, who has always looked to eclectic visuals to inspire his music. Growing up in small town Connecticut, just an hour away from the lights of New York City,
it was the visuals of the city and the riot of colors and sounds that sparked his initial journey into music. Eventually, that lure drew Young not only to the city, but also into indie pop band The Ruse. From there the ideas in that notebook began to take shape, away from the rock stylings of his day job with The Ruse to the more eccentric kaleidoscopic synth that became Heartour. A trip through electric dream pop guided by an artist beginning to see the upside of isolation. In quick succession, Young pulled double duty, setting out to complete the albums that he sketched out initially, with Three dropping in 2003, Five in 2006, and Ate in 2009. It was on these solo records that Young began to solidify what Heartour would sound like, and the ways in which it would differ from his previous projects. Writing on his own, the songs come together like a tapestry, a sn**ch of a melody from here, a bit of lyrical playfulness from there. In other words, in Young’s hands, the music becomes itself. It’s been nine years since Young released his fourth and most recent album as Heartour, Submarine Sounds, but the intervening years have produced anything but downtime. Young’s other project, The Ruse, opened for Muse on three separate world tours. When the band took a hiatus shortly thereafter, Young decided it was time to go back into the studio and create something personal once again, and the dynamic electronic soundscape of 2020’s R U IN was born.
