AQUARIUS is my first album.

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My “altar-ego” Jomama Jones has recorded six albums, including the most recent, ATEN, which formed the basis of our most recent project, ALTAR NO.1: ATEN, released in 2021. But this is the first full-length musical project drawn from my own journey. AQUARIUS is the seed of its own evolving transdisciplinary experience that weaves autobiography, history, speculation, and Afromysticism. ATEN and AQUARIUS are siblings, and I’m thrilled to partner with Oregon Shakespeare Festival through QUILLS FEST to offer my first exploration of the new material for the public. 

I asked my songwriting and production collaborator, the extraordinary musician Josh Quat, to join me in Idyllwild, California for two weeks this Summer for an immersive creative trip. We emerged with an album of ten original songs rooted symbolically in a series of cards pulled from the major arcana of the Tarot. Whereas the ATEN project had explored the vastness, power, and mystery of the solar system, tracing its impact to the personal, AQUARIUS means to look at the subtle interior spaces of the personal and seek within them the energetic threads that connect them to the movement of larger bodies of history, culture, and time. The opening track to the album laid out the journey of the whole. We call it, The Hanged Man.

Most everyone I know has undergone a tectonic life shift in the last few years, including the impacts of the volatile politics of the U.S., the COVID-19 Pandemic, the consistent rise of violence, the fight for justice, and the fight against the rise of fascism, and… and… and… On a personal level, I hit a crossroads as an artist, an educator, a citizen and found myself navigating several huge losses (including my mother, my beloved mentor, Robbie McCauley, and my inspiring singing teacher, Barbara Maier Gustern), amid calls for radical change (which I answered), and accepting invitations to move toward new pathways - but first - I felt an unambiguous sense of being pulled up and out of my comfort zone, my regular life, my old aspirations and stayed beliefs. In consultation with a brilliant tarot reader with whom I’ve worked for some time, she pulled The Hanged Man and laughed, knowingly, “you’re on the bench, kiddo!” What did it mean to have my world turned upside down as the world turned upside down? This is our response to this question and this experience.