I met Jesse Ruben, singer-songwriter and founder of The We Can Project, for the first time a few years back when he performed at Kids Need MoRe Camp Adventure in Shelter Island. He’s handsome and charming. He sings and plays the guitar with an obvious John Mayer vibe. So naturally the young girls were screaming and lining up to get his autograph, all whispering about dreams of marrying him. He played a song he had written called “We Can”, which is now my most played song on iTunes with over 1,000 plays.
The second time I met Jesse Ruben was in a small coffee shop a block away from Penn Station for this interview. I’m early. I’m so nervous that I hope he doesn’t show. I am waiting for the songwriter who unknowingly became my personal therapist. He texts me that he’s going to be a few minutes late, I sigh in relief.
I’ve had bad days when I felt so beaten and out of control of my life that I laid on the ground, closed my eyes, took a breath and played “We Can.” It calmed me, even if it was just for 3 minutes and 33 seconds. It was how I could find moments of hope. And I wasn’t the only one. That song unintentionally led to school initiative program called the The We Can Project. With over 300,0000 student participants, the program encourages kids to pursue their dreams and make a difference in their communities. It’s even made it’s way onto the Today Show and PBS.
He arrives and my nerves leave. He’s humble and open about his personal traumas and his journey as a singer/songwriter, and now, founder of a non-profit. I have to tell him how much “We Can” means to me and it’s something he doesn’t take for granted.
“I had a lot of break up songs [on his early albums]. I played a show and it went really well, but I had spent so much time talking about this girl on stage. I remember going home and thinking,what did all of those people get from my performance besides me convincing them that my ex-girlfriend was mean? By the end of the show, they were like, “she sucks!” and I was like, I contributed nothing to them. If I’m going to be on stage and take time out of their lives to spend money to come and see me, what do I want to be contributing and what do I want to be saying that’s going to be worth their time and mine? The next song that I wrote was “We Can.” The content of my songs are “Here this is for you. Whatever you got going on, one of these is going to be able to help.”
In the digital era, we have bought into this myth that a huge social media following is a requirement to success. Jesse’s following may be modest in number; but his impact is not. He has managed to beat both John Mayer and Ed Sheeran on the iTunes’s Singer Songwriter charts. He’s performed on the Today Show, signed a deal with Universal Records in Asia, has over 2 million streams on Spotify in 65 countries, and has over 12 million YouTube views on his hit song, “This is Why I Need You,” all while inspiring hundreds of thousands of children in schools across the country.
If the numbers of followers on social media is a metric of success, this should be impossible. By focusing on meaningful content and the emotional connection of songs, he was able to create a small army of loyal followers who show up at every show in their respective cities. Some even tattoo his lyrics on their bodies. “I have fans that if I play in certain parts of the country and they don’t show up, I’ll write to them and be like, ‘Is everything okay?’ The people who come to see me play, they know every song. They know my whole back story. They have been growing with me. I’m invested in them. It’s mutual. I try to make music that I connect to that I think other people will connect to and when they do that’s the best feeling in the world.”
Jesse started playing guitar when he was 16 and decided to become a singer-songwriter after hearing John Mayer for the first time. He applied to only one college, Berklee College of Music in Boston, John Mayer’s Alma Mater. He laughs looking back now that his parents even allowed him to apply since he was so terrible. “I had written 3 songs, I wasn’t good at guitar and they [his parents] were like, ‘where else did you apply? and I was like, nowhere like a psychopath.” He had been playing, singing and songwriting for less then two years when he enrolled. “When you’re first starting out, you have to be a little insane to do this. You have to have confidence. You don’t have an audience or material. You’re not that good yet, at least I wasn’t. But I knew this is what I’m meant to do. People get uncomfortable with that. People are like, what do you mean? What if it doesn’t work out? What’s your back up plan? I’ve never had one. If you have a plan B then plan B will become your plan A. I was just like, okay I’m going to make this work, how am I going to do this?”
His classmates were veteran performers; having already spent 15 out of their 18 years training. He was undoubtedly the underdog. For a newbie, this college is a stomping ground for intimidation and self-doubt, but Jesse saw it otherwise. He was surrounded by inspiring artists and musicians that were more experienced than him, which pushed him to work harder to belong. “You don’t need a degree in music, but I wrote so much while I was in college. There were literally years in college where every single thing I wrote I could tell was the best thing I had written. I could feel myself getting better in real time.”
One of the biggest challenges in the entrainment industry is finding ways to support yourself financially while pursing your dream. Artistic careers are considered to be labors of love or a phase. Jesse has never had a “real job.” When he started, his income came from playing shows in clubs, private events, and and selling CDs.
“Every summer, my mom was like, ‘you gotta get a job.’ My sister was working as a camp counselor. She was making maybe $1,500 for the summer. I went and played at that camp. I got paid for the performance. I was going to Staples buying these 100 blank disk towers and I would just burn my demos and write “Jesse Ruben” on them with a sharpie and sell them for like $5. So I would show up with a suitcase of Jesse Ruben demos and I sold a CD to almost every kid at that camp. I made more money at that one show than my sister made the whole summer. I came home and I showed my mom and she never bugged me about getting a real job again.”
His name spread by word of mouth: booking shows up and down the east coast allowing him to focus on his career as full-time singer-songwriter in Brooklyn. “Back then, I was fearless. I was e-mailing radio stations, newspapers. I still do this now. I’ll be like ok, I don’t have any gigs booked in July. I always hear, ‘I always wanted to do this, I always wanted to be that.’ I’m not special. I just knew this is what I was going to do. Every step of the way, I just know I’m going to figure it out.”
But the evolution of technology has fundamentally changed the music industry forcing Jesse to find alternative streams of revenue. “Ten years ago, 50% of my income was CD’s sales. I’d play for 100 people and sell 50 CD’s. Nobody has a CD player anymore. How do you make a living when a giant portion of your income just disappears over night? I had to find a way to reinvent myself with The We Can Project and selling merchandise.”
The We Can Project gave life to itself after he had written a song in the aftermath of tragedy. “We Can’ is actually a song meant to inspire people to run while training for the NYC marathon for the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation.
The summer after high school, one of Jesse’s good friends, Zack, fell and hit his head in a shallow river and broke his neck leaving him paralyzed. For the first time in our conversation, Jesse stumbles on his words. He was supposed to be with him, but he decided to stay in New York for the summer. Once he heard the news, he flew to Maine and spent everyday in the hospital by his side. “It was the first time I was drawn to a cause.” He became involved with the Christopher & Dana Reeve foundation; an organization dedicated to curing spinal cord injury, finding better treatments, and raising the quality of living. He joined their junior board and performed at their events before being asked to join their NYC marathon team.
Soon after, a small school in Vancouver Island, Canada that chose “I Can” as their theme for the school year, found Jesse’s song on YouTube, and asked him to visit and perform. “I flew there and landed at the airport and there were like 200 kids and their parents waiting for me at the airport. I spent 3-4 days in their community and I saw for the first time how much these young kids were connecting with the song, which was crazy for me because I wrote it for adults.”
One of their projects was “We Can make a music video for the song.” They hired a videographer and we spent the school day making a video with all of the students. Then other teachers and schools started seeing this video and reaching out to bring this program to their school. “At first, I was like ‘it’s not a program’. I just went to visit.”
After visiting 3-4 schools, Jesse became sick. By 2014, Jesse had become so sick he quit music altogether. “It was a really dark time and I was scared. For a long time, nobody even believed there was anything wrong with me.” Jesse was eventually diagnosed with Lyme disease and even after his diagnosis, his treatments weren’t working. “I didn’t know if I was ever going to get better.” He wiped through this entire savings, “I spent $50-60k dollars on treatment. That’s one of the biggest problems with Lyme disease; unless you have a lot of money you can’t afford treatment. All of my money was gone.” When he recovered in 2015, he had been out of work for nearly 4 years, had zero dollars, and had to begin again at square one.
While he disappeared, 30-40 schools across the country started creating their own “We Can” programs without him knowing. “That’s when I was like, oh, this is a thing that people need and want. I started interviewing teachers, educators, and people who were in non-profits.” From there, he created The We Can Project.
While the We Can Project is targeted at children to inspire and encourage the next generation to follow through on their dreams and give back to their communities, I wanted to do this interview because I think the message is as valuable for adults who believe it’s too late, their time is past, their not good enough, or any other excuse we sell ourselves to sedate the anxiety of giving up before we begin.
“I was doing this interview with this woman and she points to the lyric [in We Can]:
It doesn’t matter if they don’t believe
It doesn’t matter if they do not understand.
Whatever dream I am trying to achieve,
I can I can I can.
And she was like, you don’t actually believe this, do you?”
“I just looked at her and I was like, what happened to you? People get jaded and life is hard. I just remember asking her what did you always want to be when you grew up, a journalist? And shes like, no. After, she was like you’re right. I had a dream and I just totally quit on myself. That’s what the song is for, come on back.”
After his recovery from Lyme, Jesse immediately began writing music again. As a thank you to his wife, actress Jen Jacobs, friends and family who stood by him and supported him during his battle with Lyme disease, he wrote a song called “This is Why I Need You.” After hiring an intern on Craigslist, Jesse spent a year promoting the song, getting press write-ups, blog posts, hitting new records of plays everyday. For the second time in Jesse’s career, he had taken the darkest part of his life and made something positive out of it. This time giving him the biggest hit of his career that landed him a record deal with Universal Asia.
“Sometimes I’m like, ‘fuck that, I wish I hadn’t of had to go through all of that to write that song’. It’s the same thing with We Can. If Zack wouldn’t have gotten into his accident, I wouldn’t have ran the marathon, I wouldn’t have wrote We Can and wouldn’t have started the We Can Project and impacted all of these people. It’s amazing that all of this good can come out of these really horrible things. At the same time, would I rather that Zack was still walking and that I had never had Lyme disease? Yes, but that’s not an option so you make the best of it.”
Both hit songs came from incredibly personal and vulnerable experiences in his life. I ask if he feels pressure now to find new inspiration, “If I sat down to write and said, okay I’m going to write a number 1 hit, I’d never write anything. But if I sit down and I’m writing something and I say, ‘oh yeah, I connect with that. Oh, that resonated with me,’ I can shut out all the other stuff, and then I can make something that has value. I think that’s what’s important, writing things that have value.”
This was an “ah ha” moment for me. Trying to find something meaningful to say is significantly more difficult than finding something that you connect with and letting it grow. “It’s really giving myself permission to fail because nobody is going to see the stuff I throw away. They’re only going to see the stuff I keep. So I just write and write and write, and keep what works and throw away what doesn’t.
“I’ll get a little phrase stuck in my head. So, then I have to get it from my brain to my mouth out loud, which is a short trip but it never sounds the same. In my head it always sounds so good. Then when I say it out loud I’m like, ‘this is terrible.'”
Getting through the frustration and self doubt is the difference between success and failure, making it happen and sitting on the sidelines. Through Jesse’s 16 year career, that voice in his head that says, “this is dumb, you suck, no one cares” has never gone away, yet he writes anyway. An internal battle that many people never win.
“All writing is for me is hearing that voice and having an idea that I believe in so much that I just ignore it. Once I get into the writing process hours will pass by; 3, 4, 5 hours and I haven’t gotten up. When you’re really present like that, there is no room for the voice. Every time you sit down, it’s there. But my desire to be creative and my need to connect with people is bigger than that voice. The voice is always there, it never goes away. Every time I have to perform whether it’s for five people or five thousand, whether for young kids in an elementary school or a club or theater, 5-10 minutes before I go on stage it’s always the same thoughts, but I am used to them now and I know they’re coming.”
“But how do you sedate it?” I ask and he laughs. “You don’t. They don’t mean anything. They are just thoughts. We give a lot of weight to those thoughts like, ‘Oh, I’m scared. I shouldn’t do that. ‘But those are two different things. ‘I’m scared’, that’s a very normal human response. ‘Oh I shouldn’t do that’, those two things have nothing to do with each other. So when I go and talk to kids about trying new things, one of the big things I talk about is being scared and doing it anyway. That’s bravery. If you’re not scared and you do something, that’s fine. If you’re fucking terrified and you do it anyway: you’re shaking, you can’t breathe, and you feel like you’re going to die, and then you do it. That’s being alive. What do you want more, the thing you want or do you want to have an excuse for why it didn’t work out?”
It’s hard for me to imagine Jesse nervous after seeing him on stage. He seems relaxed. He manages the room gets the crowd to feed off of his energy, so how could he possibly be that nervous right before? I ask him how he survived playing on the Today Show, “I didn’t sleep for like 3 days before. I was a mess. Just panic attack the whole time. That’s a situation where performing a lot really helps. I could play We Can in my sleep. So scary to do that, but it felt so good afterwards.”
I want to thank Jesse for sitting down and taking the time to talk with me. I wanted to interview him because his music has been so impactful in my life; I know it can help so many more people. And on top of that, he uses his platform to give back; through raising money, and awareness, running marathons, and performing at charity events across the world. He consistently practices what he preaches to kids in The We Can Project by creating new personal goals, challenges, and consistently shows up. In one year, Jesse married his long-time girlfriend actress Jen Jacob, ran the NYC marathon for the sixth time, wrote a children’s book and a musical, went on tour in Asia, and has an EP coming out on June 14th called ‘Hope’. (You can pre-save it on Spotify and Apple Music with this link https://onerpm.lnk.to/JR-Hope)
May is Lyme disease awareness month. Last Summer, Long Island reached epidemic numbers for Lyme. Here are some preventative tips from an article in Patch and a Message from Jesse:
“If you are reading this and you’ve been sick for a really long time; you’re tired, your joints hurt, you’re nauseous, anxious, and you keep saying it’s just because ‘I’m stressed’ or ‘getting older’ but deep down, you think something is wrong–reach out to me. I will help you find a Lyme literate doctor. Lyme disease is a huge epidemic especially in Long Island. Health care is a human right. There are resources for you. You can get better. I promise.”
To learn more about The We Can Project you can visit https://www.wecanwecanwecan.com If you know any teachers, educators, administrative interested in a service-based learning initiative, please send their information to booking@jesseruben.com
Jesse Ruben
