CR 004: Jack Manley on Transforming Pain Into Music

An interview with the singer-songwriter about his new EP, "Unmeasurable Terms," and the process of turning difficult life experiences into art.

Jack Manley, photo by Chelsea Kyle

The French painter Georges Braque once said, “Art is a wound turned into light.” Nowhere is this more evident than in singer-songwriter Jack Manley’s new album, Unmeasurable Terms. Written over the course of a 30-day stint in rehab, the four-song EP is the culmination of Manley’s years-long struggle with drug addiction and depression. “I had sworn off music,” he says. “I had sold, given away, or pawned most of my equipment. I hadn’t released anything in years. I had given up. I felt like I failed in the music business. I felt like I failed in life. I just wanted it all to go away. I wanted my past to go away, and in retrospect, I wanted to go away, which is a difficult thing to admit, but it’s true.”

Each of the four tracks on the EP traces a stage in the addiction and rehabilitation process, touching upon codependency, relationships, and a longing for self-acceptance. Manley says the writing of the songs, as well as sharing them with his fellow patients in rehab, was enormously cathartic and a crucial step in his recovery. The other patients, he says, “provided such positive affirmations that I needed, having lost relationships and opportunities due to my addiction over the years, which I never realized was because of that. I always thought it was because of me, that I was bad, or I wasn’t talented enough or I was delusional, or whatever story I would tell myself. When in reality, it was like, dude, you blew a gig in front of the president of a label because you were high on heroin. So yeah, I got this tremendous amount of clarity and positive feedback that really woke something up in me.”

From his home in New York’s Hudson Valley, Manley spoke with me over Zoom about the making of the EP, his influences, and the process of transforming his pain into music.

---

This is a benefit for paid subscribers. If you’re interested in reading this and hundreds of others in the archive, please upgrade to a paid subscription. It gives you access to inspiring interviews, and helps me keep the lights on. Win-win!

---

SANDRA EBEJER: I read that you’re a self-taught musician. How did your career come about?

JACK MANLEY: It came about due to a love for and deep interest in music, but I think mostly a need for some sort of self-therapy. The first [instrument] I ever got—and this is gonna make me sound like Oliver Twist or something—was a bass, but it only had three strings. It was electric and I bought it for $40 from a friend. I grew up pretty poor. My father was an Irish immigrant. He passed away last year. Growing up was hard, and music was always a reliable escape and a way for me to understand and connect with these big emotions I was having. I was from this Irish Catholic [family]—you don’t talk about how you feel, you don’t express how you feel, and I felt like a bit of an outcast in my family.

So I got the bass, and I tried playing with other people in high school. But everyone, for the most part, was really into the hardcore scene. I love a lot of hardcore music, but it’s not what I wanted to play. It wasn’t until my freshman year of college when I started playing in earnest, and that’s when I wrote an EP called Hurry Up from my first band, Cosmonaut. That’s really where my musical journey started. The guys in Cosmonaut were so good. I learned tremendously fast by playing with people who are so much better than me.

When you were first starting out with Cosmonaut, who were some of your influences?

The Smiths were a big impact. Deerhunter—their record Microcastle had come out right around then. I might have been high on ecstasy, but I remember putting on headphones and hearing “Cover Me (Slowly)” by Deerhunter and it was like a spiritual experience. The first Interpol record, Turn On the Bright Lights. A lot of post-punk shoegaze [like] My Bloody Valentine. We loved the Strokes. Elliott Smith. How I gauge my output [is] I put it up next to that stuff, and I’m like, “Can this hold weight in a mix next to a Strokes song, a Deerhunter song, a Wilco song?”

I remember—this is a funny memory—being in the fifth or sixth grade and my brother was like, “It’s time you started listening to good music. Music is important. You have to develop a taste.” And I was like, “I do listen to good music! I have the new Third Eye Blind record and I have Smash Mouth.” And he was like, “No, no, no, no. That won’t work.” He gave me OK Computer by Radiohead. And hearing that as a child forever imprinted on my head, “Okay, you take an acoustic guitar, you take an electric guitar, you smash it together.” That gave me the nuts and bolts of what I believe songwriting should be about.

Unmeasurable Terms was born out of a really challenging time. Can you talk about all of the things that came together to make these songs happen?