Charm School by Obi Love Jones

Years ago, my brother, Steve, and I had a band together under the name of Obi Love Jones. We wrote songs and jammed together, although we didn’t play too many gigs together. Steve was 5.5 years older than me, so we were often in differing stages of our lives when we were younger. In 2005, we did manage to put together an album of 10 songs, titled “Sonicea”. Everything was recorded on a digital 8-track recorder in our parents’ house. While I still feel favorably about those songs, the recording quality really wasn’t great. Besides, it was mostly something to hand out to friends and family anyway. In 2007, we had begun the work for a second album, which we were going to title “Charm School” based on one of the songs. We demoed a dozen songs on that same digital 8-track, but my inspiration was waning. I liked the songs, but I didn’t like the results that I was getting from the recording medium and my limited engineering capabilities at the time. I couldn’t hear the end result. Steve could. He knew that we would eventually get there, one way or another. Unfortunately, I didn’t share his optimism, and I started to drift away from the project. Life changes were happening as well, and I didn’t make any more time for it.

Fast forward a few years to 2012. My long-term and long-distance girlfriend breaks up with me. I was never bitter about it, but it was still life-altering. Then, a few months later, my best friend, Alan, commits suicide. He was the kind of guy who didn’t care how much time had passed; when we saw each other, it was like we were never apart. He was also a musician and music teacher (like me), and we had played in a couple different bands together. I was devastated. Life was starting to get real. I knew I had to do something to try to honor him, perhaps a music project. Nevertheless, I never figured out what that could have been. I was frozen in time, but the world was still turning.

Now it’s 2022. We had all been dealing with COVID for 2 years. Steve, who was a very social person, was struggling. He had slowly developed an alcohol addiction over a number of years. He had endured several personal hardships, and he was starting to have mental health problems. He had pushed everyone away, as alcoholics often do. Combine that with the isolation of the pandemic, and you have a recipe for disaster. On January 5, 2022, his body was found in his home. We were all crushed by this news. All the thoughts that one has after such a discovery ran through our minds. I connected with one of Steve’s great friends, another musician (following the theme?), about putting together a Steve Music Project to honor his memory with some of our favorite songs of his. Then, as luck would have it, a couple months later, my wife, Anja, is diagnosed with a very rare and aggressive form of breast cancer. I had about lost my heart.

I did everything I could to stay afloat and take care of my sick wife for the next 2.5+ years. We took vacations whenever we could; we went to music and comedy shows and theatre; we tried to enjoy life together as much as possible. I didn’t have time for anything else, because I didn’t know how much time she had. And then, on December 2, 2024, Anja was gone. I held her hand in the hospice wing of the hospital with her sister and her mom until they took her body away to be cremated. I didn’t know what to do anymore. I had now lost the 3 most formative people in my life (outside of my parents), and I didn’t know how to live without any of them. However, I knew I had to live. I kept a routine. I stayed busy. I needed to keep momentum.

Eventually, the realization creeped in that I couldn’t just stay busy anymore. There was a huge vacancy in my life, not only with these people missing from my world, but also the deafening silence in a house that used to have more energy in it. I needed a project - something that really helped me heal my heart. I remembered the Steve Music Project idea I had come up with 3 years ago. I remembered that we never finished “Charm School”. I dug up that old digital 8-track recorder and found all the demos. I decided to finish the album. I took all of Steve’s vocal tracks and a select few other things he recorded and ported them over to my computer. Everything else, I re-recorded. I could have gone crazy with rewriting, rearranging and straight up redoing the whole thing. But that didn’t seem right. I wanted to produce the album that we always wanted to have, but at the same time preserve the essence of the songs as they were in 2007. A couple songs were never properly “finished”. A couple elements are also a bit “dated”; in particular, in the song “LuvU4ever” Steve talks about text speak through a 2007 lens (and uses the word “retarded” a couple times in an ironic way).

I worked hard to make Steve’s voice sound as amazing as I could from a recording on an old recording device through a cheap microphone. Overall I feel I succeeded, with a couple vocal tracks containing some weird qualities that I couldn’t clean up any further. A couple songs we sang together into one mic, so I left those as they were. Although we wrote these songs together, I wanted Steve to be the highlight of the album. I tried to put him front and center, with any of my lead parts or background vocals more blended in to serve the songs.

I am also including a bonus track at the end, titled “7 Seasons”. This song was never meant for the “Charm School” album, but I always liked it, and the only real recording we had was done on a 4-track cassette recorder. It’s much more raw, with as much noise reduction as I could apply without completely removing all the audio altogether. It is included in the full purchase of the album.

The last thing I will say about this project is that I don’t feel comfortable making money off of it personally. It was never exclusively mine anyway. That said, I want to do something positive with all the sales. That is why I am donating all proceeds of the album to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. I am providing a “pay more if you want” model so you can give however much it means to you. Please download the album for permanent ownership, and spread the word to everyone you know. I want to make Steve, Anja, Alan, and everyone I have lost proud of what we have all done.

Thank you, and love to you all. I present to you: “Charm School”.

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