“A servant girl saw him seated there in the firelight. She looked closely at him and said, ‘This man was with him.’ But he denied it. ‘Woman, I don’t know him,’ he said. A little later someone else saw him and said, “You also are one of them’. ‘Man, I am not!’ Peter replied. About an hour later another asserted, ‘Certainly this fellow was with him, for he is a Galilean.’ Peter replied, ‘Man, I don’t know what you’re talking about!’ Just as he was speaking, the rooster crowed. The Lord turned and looked straight at Peter. Then Peter remembered the word the Lord had spoken to him: ‘Before the rooster crows today, you will disown me three times.’”(Luke 22:56-61) Betrayal is everywhere, it’s even in the Bible. In fact, this quote was among many many other quotes of it’s kind. J. R. August speaks of betrayal and a lack of understanding in his song Crucify Me. Although he leaves the song open for interpretation, his meaning makes more sense to me. Out of all 10 songs that fulfill 58 minutes and 13 seconds of time to listen to, Crucify Me is my favorite song. This song (similarly to most of the songs in Dangerous Waters) is heavy and can be meaningful to so many.

“The sheer joy I felt while (making music) for the first time,” August tells me when I asked about his inspiration behind producing music. He goes on to explain that he started composing and writing songs as soon as he got his first synthesizer on his 4th birthday. August says, “it was a small red 2-octave Casio keyboard and I was so fascinated with it that I started spending more and more time with it. I always felt the need to create something that didn’t exist before and I’ve been creating ever since!” All in all, he felt an obligation to create music. J. R. continued to make music and up to now he has gathered a total audience of almost 12k (total of followers on both his Instagram and Facebook pages). He tells me that he loves his fans and that they are truly supportive of him and everything he does. They fund all of his expenses including his albums, music videos, merchandise, and more. August tells me he “tries to maintain one-on-one communication as much as I can, but lately it’s become much harder because there’s more of them each day!”

“Songs are such peculiar things and even though I write them, sometimes I don’t quite understand them until much later. They are similar to life in that way.”

-J.R. August(11/27/2019)

“For me personally, Crucify Me is about lack of understanding and about betrayal. I wrote it in 15 minutes few years back when I was in a really bad state due to my depression. Fortunately, I feel great now and as it turns out with songs, as I mentioned it before, it seems the song is about hope as well. I just didn’t know it back then.” I chose to begin talking about my thoughts on August‘s music with this quote cause it shows just how important his songwriting is to his production process. If your not used to songs being longer than 4-4:30 minutes long, then you would probably ask why write such long songs. August’s longest song reaches over 9 minutes, and of course I have yet to listen to that whole song (The Brown Trout and Nightingale). “I think, since I write them myself, I have the right to write them as long, or for that matter, as short as I like. This album is my first LP album and it’s dedicated to Mother Nature, to rivers and streams, to mountains, to friendship, to relationships we have with ourselves and with others… All these things take a long time to be born and developed, they don’t happen over night. I guess that’s why my songs are long. They mimic nature,” says August. With this said, I really admire how he chooses to use his music to express himself and how he produces his songs as well.

“I have more than a 100 finished songs and something like 10 albums ready to be recorded. That is why I really don’t have a favourite song at the moment, there are too many to choose from!”

-J. R. August

August is constantly making music and albums, but right now he is focusing on advertising his material. He is currently asking for help with advertising his music expanding his audience in other areas of the world outside of his home country (Croatia). “I’d really like to come to the UK and play some shows there,” he says. More music is expected to be released at some point this year.

I would like to say thank you to J. R. August for answering my questions, and Lisa from Knight PR for introducing me to this fantastic singer-songwriter. I don’t get requests to review musicians from the same small country that legendary football player Luka Modrić is from. You can check out August’s music on both SoundCloud and Spotify, and follow him on Instagram and Facebook. To read other articles please feel free to scroll through this website because they’re plenty more amazing musicians that you definitely have never heard of (at least that’s what I hope). If you like what you read about any of these articles then you can listen to them on Unedited’s favorite songs on our Spotify playlist! You can follow us on Facebook (@uneditedmb) and Instagram (@unedited_music_blog).Have a nice weekend, and go 49ers!!!

Overall: 4.5/5

Dangerous Waters: 4.5/5

Top Song: Crucify Me (2019)