In a world that constantly strives for perfection – where technology smooths every edge and the rise of AI can erase even the smallest mistake – the beauty of the handmade and the imperfect feels more meaningful than ever. It feels human. Like a ceramic cup shaped by hand: its tiny irregularities are exactly what make it unique.
This spirit also runs through the music of Jonathon Penn. Instead of chasing polish, the California-based songwriter leans into something more organic – songs carried by real instruments, recorded with minimal editing, and shaped by lived experience.
“My favorite things about my favorite artists tend to be the imperfections they allow us to see.”
His upcoming album It Took A Long Time To Get Young traces a personal journey through grief, fatherhood, and rediscovering creativity after years spent working in finance. The single Wildfire, which feels almost like it comes from another era, unfolds like a quiet memory rather than a direct story – tender, reflective, and deeply atmospheric. As Penn shares in our conversation: “Holding my dad’s old guitar felt like I was in some sort of conversation with him.”
We caught up with Jonathon Penn to talk about Wildfire, returning to music, recording at Sonic Ranch, and the beauty of imperfection.
photography by Robbie Bruzus
Let’s start softly. Where are you right now, and how does this moment feel for you?
I am at home in the central coast of California. A college town called San Luis Obispo, close to the water, about halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. I moved here with my wife and kids just over three years ago after a long stint on the east coast. This moment feels interesting. I have been living with this music for such a long time – I finished the record over a year ago, I was just looking back at the first voice memo demos of Wildfire from February 2024. Anyway, it feels nice to finally be sharing it.
You’ve spoken about carrying two versions of yourself — the artist and the professional who worked in finance. When you decided to leave your career, were there moments when you questioned that choice or felt doubt?
Yes, doubt, anxiety, questions about identity. I think a lot of that questioning is captured in this record. That grappling with my sense of self.
Grief, fatherhood, and change all arrived at once. How did becoming a parent reshape the way you look at time, risk, and creativity?
We have three kids now, but all these songs were actually written before our second was born. We were racing to finish mixing the record and we were able to send it to mastering right before he arrived. But wow, it’s funny, I need so much more space and time to answer this question adequately since having kids has reshaped the way I look at everything. I think if I had to try to distill it, and contain it to this idea of time, risk, and creativity, I would just say the title “It Took A Long Time To Get Young” directly relates to my experience as a father learning something true by witnessing my kids. Kids are natural born artists. Fearless and unselfconscious artists. They play. They don’t ask “is it good”? or “is it meaningful” or “is it a good use of time”? I have come to see the best thing I can do as an artist is just attempt to be more like them.
“Wildfire” feels very nostalgic to me, almost like it comes from another era. Do you take that as a compliment?
I think so! The song to me is about a particular place and people and moment in time and feeling that I will never get back to, that I can never recover. There is a painful longing at the center of it. Looking at the etymology of the word nostalgia is interesting: “Algos” – pain, grief, distress plus “Nostros” – to reach some place, escape, return, get home. So yes, I think nostalgia is fair!
“Holding my dad’s old guitar felt like I was in some sort of conversation with him.”
The song holds grief, warmth, and even small moments of humor at the same time. Was it important for you not to let the song become only heavy?
Yes, although the way I got there in this song was not a straight line. Some of my favorite writers manage to capture humor and solemnity together and I think of it like a magic trick. Like – how did they do that? I think of John Prine or Tom Waits and I see it today in writers like Adrianne Lenker or Cameron Winter. When it works, it can be amazing and maybe more true to reality. Life seems full of moments that contain both comedy and tragedy at the same time. But I also think in a song a change in tone like that can break the spell. Some songs don’t seem up to the challenge of containing that nuance. So anyway, I think it is a challenge to pull off and I am not sure that I managed to do it! But, this was one of the few songs on the record that came together very quickly. I wrote the majority of the lyrics in a single sitting. There were some lines that I wrote that kind of surprised me, that made me a little uncomfortable because they were at least partly funny, or I felt they could be perceived to be funny even though they were “in real life” experiences or memories I was drawing from. But I spent a lot of time leading up to making the record trying to change them. I kept trying to rewrite the song. But none of those revisions felt true or right. I actually went to Sonic Ranch with some of these lines as a question mark, figuring I might change them up in the studio. But when I sat down to record the song, I only had these words to sing. Reflecting on it now, I am grateful that all those lines survived intact. There was something real there.
I noticed on Instagram the beautiful photos of you all sitting around a fire, where you mentioned that you also recorded the entire album. It feels very pure and grounded. Do you think there’s a growing desire today, in such a technical world, to return to this kind of way of making music?
Sonic Ranch is a magical place. You go there, you are hours away from any city center, you live on site, eat all your meals there. The studios are dotted amongst thousands of acres of pecan trees. There are no distractions. You can really focus on what you are doing. Of course the rooms sound great and the equipment is special — like the vintage Neve console that we used was used in a bunch of Motown records and even Madonna owned it at one point. But today, amazing records are being made in bedrooms with very simple equipment. Beautiful songs are being fully captured on the iphone’s built-in microphone. So all that other stuff is nice but not essential to making a record. I think the magical thing about a place like Sonic Ranch and a process like this was the headspace it enables.
The album title “It Took A Long Time To Get Young” suggests that growing older can actually bring you closer to something pure. What does “being young” mean to you today?
This is Picasso’s idea that I am referencing, but to me “getting young” is kind of the ongoing process of reacquiring the wisdom and open heartedness of the child. Kids seem to me to be naturally creative. They seem to me to love unconditionally. They seem to me to be better connected to the beauty and wonder of the universe. One of the ways kids seem to learn is they start to parse their worlds apart, seeing this thing as separate from that thing. This thing is called “mommy”. That is called “chair”. That is obviously helpful, but the risk is we start to see ourselves as separate from the universe instead of part of it. We become self conscious and we store memories and we have incredible capacity to project possible future states and that is all obviously extremely valuable too, but the risk is we dwell on the past, or get anxious about the future, and we struggle to live in the present. We become risk averse. We get our hearts broken at some point by someone so we find it hard to love unconditionally. Anyway “growing up”, “learning” and becoming a “normal productive adult” in modern society conspires to move us away from that wisdom and open heartedness that we had when we were young. I realize that if we all acted like kids all the time, we might not like that kind of society either, but in this album cycle, I got very interested in the meaningful something that was being lost in the kind of “normal” growing up that I had been doing for some time.
“Kids are natural born artists. Fearless and unselfconscious artists.”
And do you think you’ve reached the point where you’ve “learned to strip oneself down to one’s essential creative simplicity”?
I think this is a lifelong journey. Sometimes I feel like I have only scratched the surface or only just realized that there was a thing called a surface to scratch. The creative process is humbling.
Your father’s guitar plays an important role in this record. What do you feel when you hold it now?
There is a lot of my dad in this record. He is the reason I am into music. He played guitar, got me my first guitar, taught me my first chords, let my friends and I use the garage for band practice in high school, helped us pack up the family Suburban with equipment so we could play shows at the local teen center. But maybe my best music memories of my dad were seeing him sitting on the couch, head back, eyes closed, in front of his hi-fi speakers, doing nothing else, but really listening. I never knew any of my friends’ parents to do that. Music was not a passive background thing to him. And he passed that on to me. My friends and family are generally annoyed at my inability to multi-task. If there is music around, it is hard for me to do anything but listen. Anyway, learning how to become a dad without my dad around, and processing that loss, is pretty important to the story of this record. I was actually working on a novel and to procrastinate I would pick up his old guitar and start noodling around. Song ideas started coming together and working on developing those never felt like work or something that I needed to procrastinate to avoid. It just felt like playing and holding his old guitar felt like I was in some sort of conversation with him. I have been chasing that feeling ever since.
You recorded the album live, with real instruments and minimal editing. What do you think imperfection gives a song that polish never can?
Well to be clear we didn’t record the whole album live in single takes, though one or two songs on the album were essentially made that way. But we captured most of the foundational sound, the drums, bass, guitars, and pianos live in a room together. Minimal editing was just a philosophy that Adam (producer), Peter (engineer and mixing engineer), and I aligned on before we started the record. With recording technology and software today it is almost too easy to sand all the edges off a recording. You can perfectly tune a vocal, you can fix every mistake. Today, you can make entire songs with AI. But, perfection isn’t the point of art, and I am convinced it is not even what we find enjoyable or interesting as listeners. My favorite things about my favorite artists tend to be the imperfections they allow us to see. There is complexity and humanity and beauty there.
“I am trying to stay as open as I can while the ideas are flowing in.”
Working with Adam Nash and other musicians — what was most important for you in choosing the people around this album?
I was so lucky to be surrounded by a number of super talented artists in making this record. Technical playing skills and talent on the instrument or as an engineer capturing sound, that stuff obviously matters a great deal to making a good sounding record. But working with the team on this project I realized the most important things were taste and point of view. What notes to play? What sounds to go for? What arrangement fits the song? How much compression or reverb to put on that vocal? When should this be more stripped back? When is enough enough? There is an absurd number of choices that you have to make along the way of putting together a recording. Some big decisions you can talk about and debate. But you don’t have time to deliberate over each and every one. Most of them have to be made quickly, subconsciously. Ultimately, you are relying heavily on the taste and point of view of your producer and the players in the room. Adam in particular had a strong point of view on how he wanted the record to sound and feel. We aligned on that going in and I think that went a long way to us making something we are both proud of.
What surprised you most about yourself during the making of this album?
I think I am most surprised by the level of conviction that was required to see the project through to completion. There were so many times along the way when my self-doubt became crippling and I almost gave up. The first time in the writing process when the songs stopped coming together easily, the first time I heard the sound of my voice on a demo recording not aligning with what I hoped it would sound like, the first time I shared a song with someone and didn’t get the reaction I thought I would get, the first times I was reaching out to collaborators, managers, publicists, the first experiences with social media and releasing a song publicly. I think I felt misunderstood and embarrassed more often than proud of what I was doing. And yet some part of me felt compelled to keep going. Every stage of the process seemed to offer a hard lesson and force me to re-answer the “why?”. Why am I doing this? Who is it for? How am I defining success here? And at every stage I think I got closer and closer to understanding the answer to those questions. And I kept going.
Finally, what are you trying to listen to more closely in your life right now?
I am writing a lot of new material right now, which is really exciting. I have found inspiration coming from surprising places and situations these days, and not on any kind of schedule, so I am trying to stay as open as I can while the ideas are flowing in.
Follow Jonathon Penn for more:
www.instagram.com/jono.penn
