By Eric Seamans

“We mix as well as oil and water,” begins the chorus of “Olive” by Ken Juno, the stage name of 21-year-old Mt. Airy native Matt Evans. His near-whispered vocals slide atop his own drifting production -- a process he uses almost exclusively -- as the song fleshes out. The track is peppered with funky bass riffs, spacey guitar plucks. His vocals blend tones of persecution, heartbreak and sorrow.

The Millersville University senior has been making music since age 8. Back then, Evans took music classes and had books of music to practice from, but instead of using them, sat at the piano, came up with “repetitive little doodles,” and recorded them on tapes. After the tapes piled up, he opened GarageBand on his mom’s computer and began experimenting.

As the son of renowned jazz pianist, Orrin Evans, Matt takes a lot of inspiration from his father, be it consciously or not. His mother, vocalist and record label manager, also has experience in the music industry. His parents’ love for music and their engagement in the industry reflects through Matt.

“I’d spend hours plugging in pre-set beats and guitar patterns, rarely intending to make anything more than a 10-second mess of sounds,” Evans said. “I blew an iTunes gift card on a looping app for my phone -- I really started piecing together the snippets and making short demos.”

While taking a class on music technology at Central High School, Evans was assigned a song to write. 

“Though I had years and years of musical bits to draw from, at the time the only thing I felt motivated to write about was my overdramatized high school heartbreak.” 

When asked about what influences his music, he says, “It’s all me … my songs as personal as they can be.”

Evans hasn’t forgotten his past. Even today, when he finds snippets popping into his head, he follows the path of his roots. 

“A melody would pop into my head while I was showering or out walking my dog, and I’d keep repeating it out loud or in my head until I had the chance to record it,”  he said. 

Admittedly, the majority of them are “fake-deep gibberish doomed to incompletion,” but gems do emerge. Whatever can be built upon naturally, Evans expands.

“I always find it more natural to build music around an idea than to force an idea onto a piece of music,” he said. “At this point I probably have hundreds of promising instrumentals I’ve left untouched because I couldn’t think of a good enough melody, and the same number of voice memos featuring catchy hooks I never took the time to flesh out.”

It’s no wonder his talent comes so naturally.

“Growing up, I got to see more of my dad's shows than I could count, whether backstage or tucked away at a back table,” he said. “I remember bragging to my fourth-grade classmates about going to a cool Manhattan jazz club at 11 p.m. on a school night, and despite lackluster reactions, it always gave me a sense of pride in my family’s uniqueness.”

Like his father, Evans performs regularly, currently playing out in Millersville. Of course, however, he is not a carbon copy of his father. 

“He talks a lot about how important silence is to him as a musician,” Evans said about his father. “He spends his life listening to and performing music, so to have time to take in the sounds of the world, or lack thereof, has become a gift. Sometimes I challenge myself to do the same. But often in those quiet moments my, brain makes a leap to what it knows: plucking a song out of recent or distant memory to replay in my head, or working to construct a new one to fill the gaps. For me there will never truly be an escape from music, nor do I really seek it.”

Evans, as Ken Juno, will be featured in a student recital with Bakari Hargett-Robinson on Sunday, Feb. 23, at Millersville University. Information on that event can be found at millersville.edu/calendar/events. His music can be found under his stage name, Ken Juno, on all major streaming services, specifically SoundCloud at soundcloud.com/mickey-beyda/tracks.