Jonathan Sexton grew up in East Tennessee, in the same mountains that gave the world Dolly Parton, the son of two people whose first date was a Charlie Daniels show. His dad started handing him records and telling him who played on them, who produced them, who really wrote them, before he could read the label. That's the inheritance that stuck. He writes and plays under the name JS the Wld, and he calls Nashville home now.
The résumé takes a while and won't sit still. Schoolteacher, then a touring musician for real, a Bonnaroo stage and an O Music Award and a Guinness World Record he'd rather you didn't ask about. He co-founded an ad agency that made the Inc. 5000, held an executive job in global technology, built a few music apps, wrote columns for the hometown paper and a little for MTV, and studied AI at MIT. Close enough to the machine, in other words, to trade one set of fears for another.
He landed in 1981, right on the seam, old enough to have grown up analog and young enough to have gone to work digital. That crack down the middle is more or less what everything he makes is about. He ran off from the South for a while, saw the world, and came back to Tennessee anyway, a wife and three boys, still writing songs and still fronting a band, because some things don't clock out.
Most of the digging goes into The Sound of Something More now, a book written under the eye of New York Times bestselling author Kathryn Aalto. It makes a case he believes all the way down: that a song, like a dream or a prayer, is one of those things we can't measure and can't quite turn loose of either. He's spent a lot of years learning that the long way, and now he's writing it down.
Reach himThe nearest door in is The Storm Door, the letter that arrives most Saturday mornings. For press and other inquiries, write to js@inthewld.com.