Messy Sparkles: Fayetteville, Arkansas’s One-Man Dance Party
At virtually any music venue in Fayetteville, it would not be uncommon to see a skinny young man with a striking resemblance to a Blonde on Blonde-era Bob Dylan performing onstage. However, despite the physical resemblance, the indie-electronica music of local one-man dance party, Messy Sparkles, would have surely blown the minds of music fans in 1965 even more so than Dylan going electric. Dylan, with his all his music and pop culture-shattering efforts, also never performed in his underwear. The same cannot be said for Messy Sparkles.
The man behind the moniker of Messy Sparkles is 21-year-old JD Paul. Despite his young age, Paul is a veteran of the Fayetteville music scene. His first band, Apartment 5, was a popular act in Fayetteville for several years that fit in nicely with the post-Strokes generation. Since the dissolution of Apartment 5 just a year or so ago, Paul has been a man on a musical mission. Aside from his focus on his Messy Sparkles solo-project, Paul currently performs in two other bands as well, The Memphis Pencils and Niall. However, Paul hasn’t always been the center of attention on stage, performing in his underwear and instigating uncontrollable dancing, as he is with Messy Sparkles. In fact, in the early days of Paul’s musical career with Apartment 5, he was found at back of the stage hidden behind his drum kit.
After receiving a drum set for Christmas as a 10-year-old (due to much begging on Paul’s part), he got his first taste of music. It was a taste that he liked, and he hasn’t been able to get out of his mouth since then. “It was like all I did was play that drum set,” said Paul. “I quit playing video games. I quit jumping on my trampoline. I quit riding my bike. It was all that drum set.”
Not long afterwards, Paul and a few of his friends formed Apartment 5 and developed a following, but after six years of playing together he felt a growing urge to crawl out from behind his cymbals and toms and do something new. “I was getting kind of sick of having the drum set be my only input in songs. I wanted to be able to write melodies and harmonies,” he said. Paul also mentioned that he has always had a passion for singing which was an opportunity he was never afforded in Apartment 5. “Now I’m singing my little heart out,” he said. “It’s pretty much the main thing that I do.”
Now that Paul has been performing under the Messy Sparkles moniker for a little while, he feels like he’s gotten the hang of it, and when he’s onstage he makes it look effortless as glides around in a trance-like state, eyes closed and mic in hand. However, he wasn’t always so confident. He describes his first shows as very nerve-raking and scary. At one of his first shows, he even performed behind a curtain with his silhouette and a live projection of him on television screen as his only exposure to the audience because he was so nervous.
The nervousness is obviously no longer a factor for Paul anymore. Instead of hiding himself behind curtains and warped TV screens, he performs in his underwear – as stripped-down and naked to his audience as possible without getting arrested for indecent exposure. Despite Paul’s increase in confidence, he said that he still doesn’t really like to be the center of attention going as far as to built light set-ups for his stage performance to take the eyes off him a little bit. “I’m not too terribly interesting to watch . . . but I have a blast being up in the front and rockin’ it.”
What sets Messy Sparkles apart from other musicians in Fayetteville is that he is performing in a style that, while not completely new, is not really being done by anyone else in town. His music is heavily electronic, and while there is a definite electronica scene in Fayetteville, Paul’s music doesn’t quite fit into the DJ-mixing style that is most prevalent. “What makes mine different is that I sing, and I do a lot of it live rather than mixing other people’s stuff. Everything you hear, I wrote it all, and I recorded it all.” However, when it comes to the actual sound of Paul’s music, he is reluctant to put a label on it. “I’m not good with adjectives,” he said, but most fans of his music compare him to the indie/experimental rock band, Animal Collective, who Paul cites as an influence along with other artists like Panda Bear and Paul Simon.
As far as the future of Messy Sparkles is concerned, Paul hopes to release an album before next summer, write new songs, tighten his live show, tour, and possibly add some supporting members. He was recently featured on the Art Amiss XIII compilation album along with several other fine members of the Fayetteville music scene, serving as his first official recorded release. However, at the moment, Messy Sparkles doesn’t have any future shows booked, and Paul likes it that way. He plans to spend his next couple of months off living alone in a one-room cabin fine-tuning his album. “I wanna come out with an album and then another one and another one. I really just wanna keep writing and learning.”
