Eight-year-oldAyron Jonesjust wanted to go to the playground. He wanted to go down the slide and swing on the swings and maybe run around with one of those friends you find when you’re a kid. But instead, he had to watch his mom get beat up.
As he watched helplessly from afar, one punch after another landed on his mother’s face. And while Jones never knew who that person was, he did know that the altercation had to be linked to her drug addiction, which had taken hold of her life and eventually led her to let go of all of the things that she once loved.
“I remember getting on the bus with her to go home, and there was just blood coming down from her face,” Jones, 34, tells PEOPLE. “Those kinds of memories don’t go away.”
Alyssa Gafkjen
Including his haunting top 10 single “Mercy” and “Take Me Away,“Child of the Statecements Jones as one of music’s most intriguing new characters. Standing on the shoulders of Seattle greats such asJimi Hendrix,Pearl JamandNirvana, Jones sings with a statement he must make clear and a strength he shares with those who just might need it as bad as he did.
And while he sings of the pain of his past, he also sings about the lessons and what he’s looking to follow into the future. Take “Take Your Time,” which serves as a worthy reminder of embracing each moment, even the ones that were cruel and painful and unfair. It was this cruel and painful and unfair childhood that Jones did his best to drown out as a teenager who picked up his first guitar at 13.
“There was a little bit of a natural ability, but it still took a lot of honing that in and really putting my head down and trying to figure out where I was trying to go with it and acquire the skill necessary to be there,” he says. “And even then, as a kid, I wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I’m going to grow up to be this rock star. I’m going to grow up to bethisguy.” I was just really loving playing music.”
And for a time, that’s all it was ever going to be for Jones.
He dropped out of high school when he was a senior. He snagged some food industry jobs, and tried his hand doing security. He watched his parents’ lives continue to implode and began to silently wonder if he would ever escape the grip of his brutal upbringing.
But then, eight years ago, as he became a father to his oldest daughter and he lost the mother who could never quite turn her life around, the Washington native made the life-altering decision to devote his life to his distinctive sound.
“I remember how scary it was,” he says. “I fell on my face a few times. And I had to get a job again. And that went on for a little while, but I made it work. I really couldn’t even tell you how. To me it seemed like a miracle that it was working out.”
“The fact that I had figured out how to play these weekly gigs and get enough money to at least keep myself afloat and then continue to grow was incredible,” he adds.
RELATED VIDEO:Nick JonasHints That Cracked Rib Came From ‘Intense’ BMX Biking for Olympic Dreams Special
And it’s this growth that can be heard on the new album’s 12 tracks.
“I feel like these songs are really going to speak to people who have been going through a hard time,” says Jones, who had a hand in writing each and every song on the album. “I also think for me, personally, it was important tobe somethingmy parents could never see.”
“My parents, they never saw me play,” Jones continues. “And they never knew that I had it in me to do this. And so, it was important for me to break that cycle of despair and that cycle of poverty and that hardship and that pain and to do whatever it took to overcome and breakthrough in this moment in time.”
He pauses. “My mom was in her forties when she died. That’s why I think it was so important for me to get to this point in my life, because I knew I needed to tell a different story for our family,” he says.
Child of the Stateis out now.
source: people.com
