Juan Prophet Organization creates the soundtrack to your nervous breakdown!

by Jason Bugg (for Mountain Express Paper in Asheville, NC)

If the movies of Tim Burton collided with a Tom Waits-meets-Bertolt Brecht nightmare, its official soundtrack would be the Murfreesboro, Tenn.-based Juan Prophet Organization. Combining equal parts whimsical singsong nursery rhymes with a sinister stomp and stammer, the band has created music that has been captivating and unsettling listeners for the better part of eight years.

But to simply write the band off as experimental noisemakers who forsake song craft in the name of art is just plain wrong, insists band member and violinist Grayson White. More often than not, White says, the band’s music is a stylistic collision between the main songwriters’ straightforward and experimental muses.

“We clash because we have different goals within a song,” White explains. “We come from somewhere between classical, jazz and more mainstream metal.”

But the band’s battles are more good-natured than catastrophic. It’s all part of the all-for-one, one-for-all mentality of the Juan Prophet Organization. Sure, this is a band with two distinct songwriters, Kris White and Jeff Holt, but it’s also a group of musicians with a common goal: to write heady music that makes the listener think.

“That’s why we play this music and live this lifestyle: to challenge people to listen to different kinds of music,” says Grayson White. I hope we can make people interested in different kinds of music and different ideas.”

The “lifestyle” includes a communal home and rehearsal space known simply as “Casa De Juan,” but it doesn’t end there. The band eschews management and press agents, simply because, according to Grayson White, “we like to know how and with whom things are handled and because we are certainly not your cookie-cutter band.”

The feeling that the band can and will do everything (even the mundane things, such as consent to interviews) leaks into their music.

It’s easy for a band with decidedly metal influences to throw around ideas of musical diversity and flowery terms like “progressive” and “jazzy” to describe some of their leanings, but living up to them is another matter. Still, the Juan Prophet Organization easily meets these auditory expectations, and more. This isn’t gloom-and-doom metal with pseudo-artistic leanings; this is jazz-tinged metal that requires some actual thought to listen to.

The sound of the layers of music rubbing against each other is what gives the band its musical magic. It’s heavy, it’s progressive, it’s challenging and—more important—it’s good. But it’s not always accessible.

“I think we have a couple of songs in 4/4, but we kind of like to push the envelope a little bit,” Grayson White says with a laugh.