the short version:

• born jan 27 1999 and grew up in Hampden, Maine
• made my first demo tape on cassette at six years old
• recorded my first rap demos in seventh grade for a mixtape called "rookie of the year" i never finished. i rapped over "Stronger" and "Barry Bonds" along with some beats from my buddy alex batey 
• the name "JR SPECS" was a combination of my homie Griff's suggestion to go with "JR East", and noah larson's chirps about the dorky "specs" i wore in elementary school. i wanted to change it for years, as recently as like 2018. but ive finally settled, it's just too me to be replaced
• i dropped my first mixtape on my 15th birthday. i remember a few seniors told me to keep at it (thank you matt harris and mike townsend)
• hit the stage for the first time at 16 for hampden academy's Play it Forward III fundraiser
• my big cousin jimmy (then known as J.3K) let me produce a couple joints and come to Main Street Music Studios back when it was in Bangor and we would park by Columbia Street Baptist

here's where it gets interesting. 

• for my first 3 semesters of college, i was mostly Very Unhappy. i broke up with my girlfriend. i made friends in my dorm, but when they weren't around i kicked it in my comfort zone, making beats and doom scrolling. this was a time of some memorable highs, but mostly long monotonous ruts. one day i went to the uconn rec and played some hoops with some randoms. one of them was this really small dude named clifford. i remember a massive burst of dopamine hit me after a long night of ball, or whatever other chemical i was feeling chronically deprived of. i sat there in busby suites room 404 looking up at the faint yellow glow of some string lights, and it all kind of came together: the novelty of feeling a little spiritual relief, mike and sutz right there around me, and the lighting... The LIGHTING!! I made a sample from scratch with some keys and vocal stacks, chopped it up, and made the title track "yello" on December 6th 2018
• what followed was a bona fide explosion of creativity. i made "cloud cover" right after that. i made the beat for "home" in a hallway in the austin building. i made the beat for "banana/phone" in sutz' basement when we visited. and over winter break, it all came together. I was grinding so hard on these songs that i remember i fell asleep in a bean bag chair halfway through writing "zoo", and when i woke up, i made myself finish it before i could go to bed. when i got back to school, all i could think about was this album and the color YELLO: a symbol of the original joy i lost track of. i skipped so many stats classes i got a 26 on the midterm and literally begged for mercy on the back of my final exam. i recorded "c lot" in the commuter lot on campus and had to shut my car off to eliminate ambient noise. it was COLD!!!!! by the time i wrapped up "night/light" what i had was far and away my best shit ever, a real deep dive into what i thought of happiness at 20 years old.
• I'm not 100% sure where it fits in, but somewhere in here Sutz and I also made a 3-pack of collabs called OVERDUE and put that out. it was a lot lighter and frankly more fun than the autiobiography shit i was doing on YELLO and it gave me a lot of extra practice. this was where our chemistry really developed-- sutz and i to this day have a dynamic that's very rare in the studio. he just gets it
• my wonderful friend MIKE who so fortunately dormed across the hall from me as a freshman, drew the YELLO album art in pencil after i showed him the art from Cream's "Disraeli Gears". he put so much care and imagination into it-- nothing else could have done the tape justice. Mike's proximity to my creative process and his straight up genius made it special. Sutz bounced every idea and put in an insane verse on "home", the NYC foil to my maine perspective on growing up. it was perfect. we dropped it on April 26, 2019 and posted an announcement freestyle to the UConn Buy or Sell facebook group. I had uconn basketball players gassing me up in the comments (despite my weird t-rex rap hands). shout out to Jalen Adams and Christian vital. But the bottom line is, through our geurilla tactics and plain old word of mouth, YELLO did like 30 thousand streams on spotify out of nowhere in its first few months. The coolest shit that had ever happened to me.
• through this time period, I started to take every show opportunity I could find at UConn. I played the campus radio station, Huskies Tavern, auditioned to open for Lil Baby and fell on my ass kinda. but nothing was more primetime than opening for Phony Ppl at Mischief After Dark 2019. That was the first time i felt like i WORKED a crowd. quite a rush. I headed back to Maine for summer 2019 feeling like the next level was in my grasp (narrator: it wasn't)

• covid hits in march 2020. my happiest year of college so far is cut 6 weeks short-- we never come back from spring break. It was a bummer, especially because I had a feeling it might finally be my turn to open the massive spring concert at UConn. 
• The 2020 lockdown paved the way for maybe my greatest burst of inspiration ever: cooped up in my childhood home, I came up with a slew of my best songs ever in about a week that reflected on my childhood in Maine. I think i made BABY KNOCK ME DOWN, TURF, and BEAR IN THE SKY in the span of three days. basically an entire concept album about my coming-of-age ('99 DAYDREAM) wrote itself in a month or so. i recorded the chorus for UNCLE AL alongside my old friend Wyatt on my folks' back deck (it was a still night) and we put '99 DAYDREAM out on July 24, 2020 (my first release working with my managers Garrett and Alex after they caught wind of things post-YELLO. Soto produced a fire song called "DAMN SHAME" for the album as well that just didn't fit the concept. I'd drop it now but it's got a bar about the 2020 election cycle. womp womp)
• this was where i finally decided to use "JACK & JILL" from a whole year earlier. it was the first time i really dug up an "old" song. important boundary to break for my next couple projects
• the album had some crazy New England hip hop names on it in Spose, Michael Christmas and B. Aull, plus my NYC friends in Sutz, Stak, and deej. even though the single version of TURF is my biggest joint with over 100k, the album didnt shatter YELLO's numbers like i had hoped. as a matter of fact, there are plenty of heads within my friends and day 1 fans that still say YELLO is better than '99. for me, it's a no brainer-- '99 is the better work, and i think those that beg to differ might not have the context to appreciate an album all about growing up in little old hampden, maine. it's also a nostalgia trip-- we were all still kids when YELLO dropped. '99 came out in the height of our collective worst year. can't win em all, but i love both projects like children
• after my album, i locked in with Sutz, Stak, deej.zip and lune.boy to make our SEASON VII compilation tape. it was a project full of some pretty inventive shit talking, and a crazy example of the beauty of the internet-- i had never even met deej or lune when we put most of this thing together. we linked up in NYC to make MICHELIN STAR FREESTYLE, which caught the attention of former NBA All Star and UConn alum Andre Drummond (he hit me and said we should collab. This has not come to pass)

• when i got to New York, I looked at my absolute war chest of demos i'd made in that basement senior year and decided i should just let em fly. i cooked up this scheme called "JR SPECS Payday" where i would drop twice a month, on the first and the 15th. The plan was to do this for an ENTIRE YEAR, 24 singles back to back to back. It started really strong with "Ball if i want" quickly becoming one of my biggest songs. the aggressive release tempo also tested me to make a good song under pressue and still keep to a high standard
• streaming numbers didnt snowball as i had hoped, but i think dropping all the time was a head-turner outside of the digital realm. when i told people my release cadence at shows and networking events, it seemed to leave a mark-- and we were really outside, too. i remember the homie dylan green told me and garrett that we seemed to be at every event that year (now thats what we like to hear!!!). 
• somewhere in the first half of Payday, Malik Elijah peeped what i was up to and reached out to me for a feature. I made it a point to turn that shit around VERY FAST-- i think i got a verse back to him the same day he sent it. That situation taught me to always apply yourself immediately when you get a chance at an exciting collab-- Malik ended up returning the favor and murdering Welcome to my Zone soon after that. life happens and i cant always sit down to do a feature the moment it's sent. but if i have a strong feeling it's a pivotal moment, i try to make time.  punctuality is a scarce commodity. 
• notched my first couple of NYC shows opening for Spose and Chase Murphy, had a blast and got some more practice in. still waiting on that first NYC headliner at time of writing this. going to be cinematic. 
•  think the Payday single series had some ALL TIME gems in my catalog that flew under the radar because of the rapid fire strategy-- "Feeling american" and "Witch Doctor" for example are probably two of my best songs still, and could've done with a longer push. Too many sacrificed bangers to list, just check the full series out here on spotify
• i ended up putting out 15 songs in 2022 before i decided interest had dwindled (both from my handful of true fans AND ME!! i wanted to start an album pretty bad by the time august rolled around, so i did. 

the sequel to YELLO: "NIGHT SCHOOL" . this is what i was mostly working on from the time i stopped payday in 2022. i had a chip on my shoulder and wanted to create something unbeatable, a handful of my best songs. i came up with this world that revolved around two puppets called Buggie and Deuce-- they were in the cover and all the animated content i posted for the rollout. at the time i'd have told you a lot more about it, but now honestly it makes me a little sick to my stomach. i burnt myself out in a really crazy way for this project thinking it had to be my big break. ultimately what it taught me was... you cant make a perfect record. and if you try, you might sterilize the most interesting shit about you in the first place. i still like the record, but i think i played it a little scared. the massive gulf between my expectations and the results had me down pretty bad for a while and reconsidering my goals. 

the equal and opposite reaction to this time of disappointment and soul searching after the NIGHT SCHOOL release, was my EP "the victorian metal detector." i made this in october 2024 coming off of a shitty year, in just a few days, and threw it out there. it's crazy to think plenty people said it's my best work. goes to show, all that practice pays off and you might be your own worst enemy if you censor yourself trying to be more palatable. the title doesnt even mean anything really-- "the victorian metal detector" to me was just your gut feeling. the oldest dowsing rod there is