Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Jenna Watters. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Hi Jenna, thank you for being such a positive, uplifting person. We’ve noticed that so many of the successful folks we’ve had the good fortune of connecting with have high levels of optimism and so we’d love to hear about your optimism and where you think it comes from.
Sometimes it can be hard to stay optimistic when you’ve been hustling to become a successful musician for many years and you see musicians/bands that just came on the scene that are already more successful. I guess this is where the definition of “success” comes into play. In spite of what is happening around us, we have to remind ourselves that the journey is more important that the destination, and that we get to do what we love for a living, even if it doesn’t get us “to the top”. Getting to play music with some of the best musicians in Texas on a weekly basis is part of the reward for us. It keeps us happy and helps us maintain a positive outlook.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
Daniel and I grew up in Sedona, Arizona and started playing music together after we were asked to sing “Bridge Over Troubled Water” by Simon & Garfunkel for our high school graduation. For years after that, we both lived in different cities but wrote songs together from afar and when we’d come back home for the holidays we’d play duo shows together at different coffee shops around Arizona. In 2009, after Daniel graduated college in Los Angeles, he decided to move to Denver, Colorado where I was living and we started our first band, “The Oak Creek Band”, named after our hometown. We toured with this band around the country for about 4 years, then made the move to Nashville to try to take our career to the next level. Unfortunately, the Nashville scene was not for us, and decided to leave and head West. This was the end of “The Oak Creek Band’. We visited Austin on our way back to Arizona, and wondered why we didn’t consider the Live Music Capitol of the World as a place to live sooner! We changed our band name to “The Watters” and quickly immersed ourselves in the music scene. Our sound begin to adopt influences from Americana, Soul, Jazz & R&B, and we went from a 4 piece band to a 7 piece band with a horn section. We finally found “our sound” and all the amazing musicians we’ve been waiting for. Our debut Watters album, “Great Unknown” was released in 2016, our second self titled album was released in 2018. We bought a house in South Austin, had our son in March of 2019, and won a major grant through an organization called Black Fret that same year, which paid for our next full length album, “Intuition” which featured musicians like JJ Johnson (John Mayer, Tedeschi Trucks Band), Ephraim Owens (Tedeschi Trucks Band), and Anthony Farrell (Greyhounds). Our last 4 song EP, “Mellow” was released in 2022 and we are currently in the process of putting the finishing touches on our newest project, which we are very excited about and believe is our best piece of work yet. We plan to release it early 2024.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
There three most important qualities for our success have been patience, perception (intuition) and perseverance. In a gig based industry where things are always relatively unknown, having patience and letting opportunities come to us as opposed to constantly seeking out gigs has seemed to serve us well. Then being able to say “No” to opportunities that don’t serve us fully is another skill that has allowed us to keep chugging along. When we said yes to everything gig offer we had, we found ourselves stressed out by having to fill in substitute musicians who didn’t know our material, which meant more rehearsals more organization and more time, for a less quality performance than we would have done with our normal musicians. We have found by being more selective with our time and who we play with, we have more peace of mind and provide a better service. Finally, our perseverance after 15 years of performing together is what has kept us together and helped us overcome the many challenges that we have faced. It’s a lot easier to persevere when you keep it fun and don’t over burden yourself with it. We try to keep space between our music lives and our day to day lives, which is a challenge in itself as they are so intertwined.
One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?
Right now we are searching for a booking agent to get us back on the road touring again. We had our son four years ago and stopped touring at that time. We spent many years in a van on the road before his birth and love traveling, but have a baby made it impossible to continue at the time. He has reached an age to where we feel we can start traveling again if we have the right opportunities to do so. However the world has changed quite a bit in the last four years and we don’t have many contacts anymore on our tour route so we will basically be starting from scratch again. A booking agent would ideally help us get back in a travel rhythm. Our ultimate goal is to travel the world with our son, playing music along the way.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.wearethewatters.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/wearethewatters
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/wearethewatters
- Twitter: www.twitter.com/wearethewatters
- Youtube: www.youtube.com/thewatters
Image Credits
Image #1 by Sarah Hardy Image #2 by Ashleigh Amoroso
