Former Evanescence guitarist Jen Majura was surprisingly dismissed from the band a few years back. Then earlier this year, Majura shocked fans when she announced she was getting out of the music industry altogether. “Dear friends, I’m gonna make this as brief as I can: After careful consideration, observing what’s going on in the music industry, AI related developments and change in society I’ve come to the conclusion to step away,” she wrote.
In a new interview with Brazil’s “Ibagenscast”, Majura went into further detail with why she made the announcement. “Imagine I’ve been doing this since I was 17 years old,” she said. “I just turned 42 this year. The thing is life is constantly changing, and I don’t have any problems with that. People are changing. It’s fine. That’s life. But the more and more I’ve been doing this, and this defines touring, constantly being on the road, even having a barkeeper in an airport lounge calling you by your name because you’re there all the time, it’s like you are traveling too much, you’re doing this too much. And countless nights spent on airports, on planes, dealing with jet lags and being exhausted. And sure, playing the shows is a great reward, but all that is an equilibrium that comes with the fact that I sacrificed my private life for all my entire life. I never had a private life. I always put my work first.”
“It’s a combination of a lot of things,” she continued. “A.I.-related developments. Press, do not tell me I quit because of A.I. It’s A.I.-related developments. You have to hear all the words, and social change, to finish the sentence. All of that, if I just compare to how my drive and my view of music and musicians — and I call it the scene, not the business, has been when I started out as a teenager compared to now, it’s just very different. And I just said ‘no’ to playing the hamster wheel circus game. It’s like the less you wear, the more clicks and likes you get. And whenever I see something like that — not mentioning any names, but somebody simulating a bl*wjob while using a talk box to cover a song where, who knows if she played, and gets millions of likes, I’m out. I’m sorry. It should be about talent, passion, ideas, creativity, music. It should not be about superficial crap like that.”
“The more I saw things like that — it’s all about the makeup, it’s all about the less clothes you wear, it’s all about the sexier you look, it’s all about like faking. Dude, I got sick over the years with that, and I realized with my own behavior, the less others were dressed, the more I put on kind of like the Billie Eilish style, like, ‘Okay, I’m wearing baggy jeans and a triple oversized hoodie then.’ I don’t give a sh*t, because I find it so hard for people to look at the actual value and worth of a post, which is the music and the creation and the feeling, instead of the look. The look is gonna be gone in a couple of years for anybody who takes advantage of it that right now. And I’ve always been thinking like that, but it got harder and harder for me to make that clear, because there was a certain point in time where social media likes meant more than talent to companies, labels. And that was pretty much the point in my head where I said, ‘I don’t wanna be part of this anymore.’ I have to, like, what? Eat canned corn for a week and then sh*t a poop into the toilet, film it and post it and get millions of likes? I don’t wanna make an idiot out of myself just for generating likes to get the interest of people to listen to my creation. And I just definitely said, I don’t wanna do that anymore.”
Majura’s full interview can be viewed below.
