Let me tell you about my friend Jared Newby. I just wrapped up coding this memorial, yet I feel there’s something missing. There are a lot of facts here. They “fill out” the data associated with my friend… but they don’t really bring out his character. Data has a way of doing that. So let me cut thru the data and get gritty for a second.
I didn’t meet Jared until 2005. This guy’s girlfriend (who, quite possibly, had once been a guy herself) is working in the hairstyling salon next to the Thundercloud subs where my friend DC and I are working. He comes in for subs just about every other day. Every time we are playing some new music that this guy can’t stop nodding his head to. Finally, he asks, “Who is this?”
DC smiles. I laugh. “That’s me”, I answer.
Enter Jared Newby. He tells DC and I about the award he won just a few months ago, giving us both a copy of a CD with his most current singles burned on it. To put it bluntly, the disc fucking rocked. I heard “Tashiki’s Balance” and flipped, sending a copy to my brother Tristan that very night. DC heard “Fade” and shared copies as well. Austin has talent like this dripping off the ceilings, but it just never seems to get old… fucking top-shelf musical geniuses fill the city to full, yet they’re mopping floors and waiting tables. Gotta love it and laugh at it… or ya come to hate it.
Back on track. Jared starts coming behind the sub shop while we are smoking and making music. He had only dabbled in Sonar, which was one of the only two applications I used at the time. I gave him a tour and gave him all the sets I had mixed that he’d asked for. Any recording artist who has gotten together with another artist will understand the energy in that moment. It can barely be contained. Ideas, stories, music… you can’t even keep up with it all.
Jared comes and finds me after I get back from Burning Man and asks, “Do you make your own stuff?”
No. Not yet. Not then. But I told him I knew I could. He decided to take a gamble anyways, so we set up a time and a place to meet. That would be Mojo’s. I had just moved myself off of the streets and was no longer working. We connected immediately on that note. I found out about the years Jared had spent homeless…
…I gotta stop typing “Jared”. I know that this is the name by which a good handful of people know him by. He is “Mushuto” to me. I keep feeling a twinge to hit backspace every time I go to type his name. It’s Mushuto from here on out for this entry.
Mushuto had a lot of stories. I have my own share. To say that the life of the street is “interesting” is a way of summarizing the many beautiful, tragic and life-defying experiences that only a state of pure survival can offer you. Mushuto had taken a much darker path than my own, but there was plenty of dirt, blood and oil on my own tattered rags. Despite the streets, our stories had led us to making music together. That alone was already awesome.
My first original piece was called “Nightshade” (now titled “Sombranoche”). It was instantly met with applause from Mushuto and our circle of listeners. He cleared me to begin working on an EP. I was only a few tracks deep when he said he wanted a full album… and in weeks. Sheesh. I loved it though. I had been mixing and re-mixing the works of others so long that making my own music was not only a new experience, but personally fulfilling on an entirely new level.
Meanwhile, I help Mushuto organize the track orders and song titles for three of his albums. His song “Shadowing” is hitting KarmaDownload and licensing firms hard, ranking high with the fans and making a nice place for itself on the Top 10 for both KarmaDownload and Download dot Com. His continued success inspires me to keep up the sprint right alongside him.
Casshern. All he had to do was say the word. What followed was a moment of silence from both of us, then I just said, “Yeah… the only positive from that movie is that we, the viewers, have a chance to make sure that this future is not our own”. Supa, a DJ from the midwest and a friend of mine, has seen the movie as well. It becomes a centerpiece of our online conversation. Hearing about Supa, and having already begun collaborating on the Symbis project, Mushuto wants to bring her on board the label. I’m all about it.
Welcome to 2006. NYE 2005 was amazing, painfully so. 2006 brought our public launch online. I got to shout out the word while at a birthday party for my friend Squeaks. My album was on sale!
…but Mushuto was nowhere to be found. Emails were not answered, blog entries went without comments. I had the access info for KarmaDownload and other online accounts, so I made sure that the sites progressed. Fortunately, I only felt abandoned for the first few weeks of the year. Mushuto and his girlfriend had broken up, and she’d taken his laptop. He was living between places and overjoyed with how I had maintained the whole label in his absence.
I wasn’t even sure how to take the offer to become a co-owner. No idea what the responsibilities were, nor if I wanted or even deserved them. I told him I was leaving to go hitchhiking, having run out of funds and in need to build our promotional network. It was good to hand the reigns back over… the reigns for our new label. . . such a weird thought. . . our.
2006 hurt. Licensing… gone. Distribution… gone. Losing KarmaDownload was death. Too many eggs in one basket. Our publicity was built up primarily thru fans that networked thru KarmaDownload. Our contact info and links to sites were on there. Without warning, it was gone.
Mushuto’s health had taken a hit after New Years. Each hit the label took was like a hit to him as well. I brought in good news about contacts in the entertainment industry, and even built the CD Catalog and spread our video agreement… but the hits we took were too many and too hard in comparison. By the end of 2006, Mushuto had given up in many ways and was mostly trying to survive.
I saw my friend only three times in 2007. We kept in contact online, but the loss of our website closed a lot of that down as well. It was great to start receiving new music in the mail from him. That inspired our last efforts before I left Austin for a new trip that year. He had plenty of complaints, and he was hurting, but he had hope.
At the end of September, I received word from Supa that Jared had died at the beginning of the month. I didn’t know how to take it. I still don’t. We had only the loosest plans, writings and emails to go by in the event that one of the owners were to die. With only weeks left before I was flying to Europe, I went into mechanical work-mode online to salvage the label, working alongside Supa to help ensure that our arts and the arts of our friend would survive the loss.
This memorial has taken the longest time to build, longer than our new site has taken and much longer than it took to create a new EP. I know I’ve done my best, and I know it will never be good enough at the same time. I also know that I don’t want the only memorial to be the one I built on MySpace. I want a place to put my friend to rest that is deserving of his spirit.
I still haven’t seen his tombstone. I don’t even know where it is. No one knows where his last laptop went to. Supa and I, looking thru our salvaged data, realized that we have no video, nor any voice recordings from Mushuto. So many losses… too many.
Now we are faced with choices that determine whether the label dies for good, or whether it moves forward. We’re out-gunned, working on nearly no resources and have taken about every loss we could have. No, that’s not true. It can get worse. The goal is to make it better.
My friend’s music lives on. We are pushing forward. It may take a katana or two to cut a path forward, but the options had been reduced to the most simple of all decisions: live or die. We’ve chosen to live.
If you enjoy and download even one song by Jared Newby, we have very simple and humble request: If you really like a song, please share it with everyone you know. The mortal body of Jared Newby has fallen and lies buried somewhere. His music is still alive. It does not have to die. It can live on as long as there are still people who are listening to it.
This is my goodbye. Thank you my brother. I carry you with me.
