Born in Chicago but raised in the San Francisco bay area, Jason Mezilis grew up in a musical household; influenced by his father’s classical guitar playing and traditional Greek dance music. At age 7 he was inspired to take up the piano after seeing a televised performance by classical pianist Vladimir Horowitz. “There was a physicality about his playing that was attractive to me,” Jason remembers. “It wasn’t just the sound; it was a combination of that and the way he whammed on the instrument. Somehow, it came out huge and beautiful.” By his teenage years, Jason discovered the heavy yet melodic guitar rock of Van Halen and Def Leppard. “I started learning all of this guitar stuff, like Joe Satriani, on the piano,” Jason explains. “But I have to credit the song “Panama,” off Van Halen’s album 1984, with actually making me transition from piano to guitar.”

Jason’s distinctive tone and playing style were actually born out of what some musicians might consider a hindrance. “The bones in my left arm are twisted,” the guitarist reveals. “So, my wrist will not turn more than about 10 degrees beyond the vertical. This means I can’t physically fret with my left hand, as a right-handed player normally would. Eventually, I just capitulated and bought a left-handed guitar; a black Fender Stratocaster, which is the same guitar that I primarily used on this EP.” Jason confesses that while he could have gone the way of the shredder, his wrist problem likely helped to reinforce what was already his primary interest: delivering more of an emotional experience through his playing. Looking back on how he came up, Jason admits, “Like some of the old school players such as Mick Ronson and even Steve Clark – one of my favorite guitar players, ever – I’m looking to combine a meaty sound with a great feel.”

Jason literally began work on Between The Lines out of frustration with having too much downtime between recording and performances. “I’ve always loved recording cover tunes just for fun,” he says. “I started looking at songs I had in the bag and slowly this collection came together.” Recorded in a variety of studio scenarios – from a home 8-track to a 2-inch machine and Neve board in a thousand-dollar-a-day studio, Jason also produced the EP and supervised the mastering process. “Mastering and song sequencing took forever,” Jason explains. “While mastering, we needed to make the songs flow so that it would somehow make sense as a collection. But it was a labor of love and I’m very proud of the result!” Despite being able to achieve a variety of dense and provocative soundscapes, Jason also shunned the use of any guitar effects during recording. “Having all of these options – pedals, concepts and different things – inspires most people,” he asserts. “But at the root of what I’m trying to get across artistically is the idea of being inspired by and finding art through limitations: stripping things down to the barest essentials, then getting as much as I can out of as few elements as possible, while also exploring the full dynamic range of emotion. With the exception of a few vocal overdubs, every song is only guitar, drums, bass and vocals.”

Between The Lines collects four tunes from a catalog of classic rock, pop and blues songs that will be at once familiar to most listeners; the exception being that you haven’t heard these songs sounding quite like this before. “I like to take complicated ideas and deliver them in a very every-man kind of way,” says Jason. “For example, I might take an odd meter song and deliver it in a way that it sounds like a garage band; creating something that’s very earthy and organic, with an added depth, because it came from a very cerebral place.” Jason is especially proud of the engaging, odd time signature arrangement (“four/four minus a sixteenth note on every turn around”) he created for Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right Mama” (popularized by Elvis Presley). “It’s total math rock,” he says of the track, “but we did it in a way that it sounds like it came out of the garage.” He also turns Bob Dylan’s folk-pop classic, “All I Really Want to Do” into a heady mix of Soundgarden Meets Hendrix, and blows the roof off the joint with a moody, soulful call-and-response style male/female vocal duet on “California Dreamin’.” I don’t hear things as they are,” he admits. “I hear them and my brain reinterprets them.” The record also features one original composition, “Jerry’s Song”; a solo acoustic guitar piece the vein of Steve Howe’s “Mood For A Day” that provides an enchanting palate cleanser among the various electric interpretations.

“On this record,” Jason continues, “I hope to make a connection with my style and production in two ways. First, I want to bridge that gap between high art and garage rock delivery. Nowadays everything is so polished. I don’t feel that this is a retro thing as much as it’s about a return to organics. The other point that I’m trying to get across is the idea of using rhythm as an effect in the same way a composer uses major or minor chords to elicit feelings of joy or sadness. For example, the Elvis tune goes through all of these whacky convolutions of rhythm, but after the solo and break down we purposefully cut into a straight four thing, because it needs that sense of resolution.”

“A key to doing a good cover song is to make it sound like the person covering the song also wrote it,” the guitarist concludes. “These may not all be original songs, but there’s enough interpretive work going on that I think it has merit. All I know is that I believe in this. To me, music is not a reflection of being inspired by my surroundings; it’s about distilling down to the abstract, to the purity of the song and the sound. At the end of the day, the song serves the feel. And the feel is the most important thing.”
-Gail Worley, Jan 2010