A Peek into the Evolution of Music and Technology
By Megan Bryant Photography Kimberlee Miller
As a teenager, Jahred Gomes, now globally known as a musician with HED Planet Earth -aka- HED P.E., went to his first rock concert. Like many youngsters, it quickly sunk in as a dream for him to be a creator of music. Unlike a lot of those dreamers, though, he diligently stayed dialed onto the course to make it a reality.
He cut his teeth for a while with several neighborhood bands in the Huntington Beach, SoCal area, and, in the early 90’s signed first record deal after a few years of the band playing together. These are the days long before downloading, and he reminisced about recording their record on actual tape. Gomes chuckled a bit as he explained that the “first record was transported in a U-Haul truck back and forth for mixing…Now everything fits right onto a jump drive.”
We’ve all seen movies with that nostalgic flare of a band getting discovered and he confirmed that it really was a lot like that. He recalled it was much like the “old time stories where the guys in suits come from NYC to see your show and they came to their house and then flew them out to New York.” There was a lot of focus on SoCal bands in the early 90’s and HED P.E. was regularly selling out at their home clubs. After self-producing their own CD and quickly selling out all 5,000 copies, he attributes that it’s possible they “may have caught wind of that,” ultimately helping to score the contract.
That first record deal was a 3-record, 7-year deal and it did well for him, but then he decided to go independent around 2005. Going independent gives you more advantages in that you can be closer to your music and creativity and keep a closer eye on your finances, plus, he had a bad taste in his mouth from the big label trying to influence his music a little too much at times.
Technology in the music world is very give and take. These days he’s able to have a studio in his house whereas that was very uncommon in the past. As a “big fish” type of performer, no doubt he feels it would be to their advantage to be on with a label that takes care of all the nitty gritty details but having the ability to produce independently keeps things closer to the vest. Collecting payments from music providers like Spotify, for example, is a big change because everything functions in a virtual space.
Gomes, originally from Fort Worth Texas, and a first generation American with parents who hail from Brazil, met his wife almost 20 years ago at the “Big Easy” concert house (now the Knitting Factory) right here in Boise, and resides in Eagle with his sweetheart and their eleven-year-old son, Zion.
“I had never planned to be a family man, thought I would be a loner; live a narcissistic life” said Gomes, and when he met his wife it changed everything. He describes his world as “living kind of a fairy tale life, [more] than what I expected as a kid.”
One of his most cherished memories was of his son being side-stage. Gomes saw him standing there and said “watch this” as he ran to jump into the crowd during a performance.
No surprise, looking back now, that the best moments involve his son, who first learned to crawl on a tour bus. “Other “big time” stage/performance memories really seem cliché,” said Gomes.
HED P.E. is a blend of Rock/Punk/Rasta/Soul and is actively touring and kicked off 2019 with a tour throughout Russia and Eastern Europe, and they are blazing from one side of the U.S. to the other with dozens of show dates to choose from.
