I think shit really started getting real for me in my third year of high school. That’s when I was kicked out for distribution of pornography.

I had written a zine which I had titled Heavy Mental. It contained all the edgiest and most deliberately provocative prose my tortured teenage brain could conjure, and was heavily inspired by the writing of Henry Rollins, my biggest idol at the time.

I don’t remember most of the content of Heavy Mental, and I’ve long since destroyed the notebooks from which it was culled. I remember there was a thing about getting my ass kicked by Fiona Apple, a kind of feminist statement. And of course I remember the particular passage that got me kicked out of school and changed the course of my life forever at 16 years old.

The piece was coincidentally inspired by something from a book I had borrowed from the school library, a profoundly disturbing first hand account of the Hell’s Angels by journalist-provocateur Lester Bangs, featured in the compendium Mainlines, Blood Feasts and Bad Taste.

My passage described a young woman getting sexually assaulted and then stomped to death in a school gymnasium. The story was very short but it was pointedly graphic. I remember something about brain matter on shoes. Intense stuff, I know. Misguided, for sure, and tricky to defend out of context. Also, assuredly, utter crap.

But then again, I was a child when I wrote it.

Truth be told, I didn’t even know about “zines” until one night in 2006, at The Masquerade in Atlanta. I was there to see my friend Ben sing with a bluegrass band called Tova Rinah & the Way Home. As I recall, they were really good.

Outside the venue, people were smoking cigarettes. Ben wasn’t around and I didn’t know anybody else there. There was a guy, I have no idea what his name was, who was handing out copies of a handmade magazine he had made called I Hate Andy Hull. I remember taking a copy and asking him who that was.

“That guy.” he said, and pointed through the crowd of smokers to Andy Hull, lead singer and songwriter of Manchester Orchestra.

I couldn’t tell you what was in the I Hate Andy Hull zine, and I have no further information about either the creator’s motivation or the response of the hated subject. But it sparked an amazing idea.

This was around the time I had started recording my own music, making CD-R copies with photo copied, hand-cut covers and handing them out for free to anyone at my school that would take one. A staunch student of Ian MacKaye, I believed in the depths of my punk rock heart that DIY was the only way to do anything.

But I had never thought about making a book.

Holding I Hate Andy Hull in my hands, examining its staples and folds, I saw my pathway to the world of published literature. So, with no awareness of the precedent set by zine culture, I set out to make one of my own.

It didn’t take long to put it together. I was a voracious writer, using it as on outlet in the spaces between recording music. Just like then, now, and always, I had a lot to say and it couldn’t all be contained in a song.

I picked some of my favorite writings, edited them, messed around with layouts and fonts in Microsoft Word, and quickly put together a prototype - a stack of about 12 pieces of double sided paper, which when folded and stapled together would comprise my literary debut. For the author cover on the last page, I did an Altavista image search of my name and used one of the results, a twelve year old looking kid who bore no resemblance to me at all. There was no real reason for this…it was just my idea of a joke.

Since I didn’t understand how to make double-sided copies, my friend Kenneth graciously offered to make them for me with the copy machine in the basement of his family’s church. He later described feeling fear when his mother briefly walked into the copy room to ask him a question, prompting him to try to covertly keep her from reading the contents of the papers he was copying.

If she had seen it, maybe it would have prevented what happened next.

I made about 25 copies of Heavy Mental and did indeed distribute them to friends and acquaintances around school. It included an explicit instruction for the reader to pass the book along to someone else once they finished it. I have no idea who or how many people ended up reading it.

I’m grateful all the copies of my debut novella have been lost to time, since I have no doubt the writings within would make me want to crawl out of my skin from embarrassment. But I’m still impressed with my teenage self for seeing this project to fruition.

Reactions, however, were mixed. Some of my friends told me it sucked. Others said it was genius. Truthfully, my artistic intention at that age was more to shock than to enlighten or engage anything. Like a great deal of my output in those days, the book was more an angry and nihilistic expression of American frustration than anything…intended to be as much a “work of art” as it was an explosive device.

About a week after the zine’s release, I was in my bedroom when my mother (very drunk, since deceased) banged on my door and demanded I do the dishes.

Without protest, I walked past her into the kitchen and started doing as she asked. She continued to berate me for my lack of appreciation of her as I silently took to the sink and began rinsing the plates and mugs, calmly placing them in the dishwasher one at a time. I didn’t know it yet, but I was doing something called grey-walling.

Suddenly, the phone rang.

My mom picked up the phone, said “Hello?” and then there was a long period of silence as she listened intently to whoever was on the other end. I still don’t know who it was.

As the silence continued, I turned away from the dishes to look at her. She was clearly getting news of some kind of tragedy. Someone had died, I was sure. But who?

Slowly, she raised her hand to her mouth as a look of horror came over her face. She started sobbing deeply. Then, choking her slurred speech into the phone receiver, she said, “Oh my god. Oh my…god. I am so so sorry. I’m…so sorry. I’ll talk to him.”

Like in many households, my mom kept a legal pad next to the phone. I watched as she picked up a pen and wrote something on it which I couldn’t read at first. When my eyes adjusted to her inebriated squiggles, I realized what she had written.

It was the words HEAVY MENTAL.

“Fuck!” I exclaimed. I knew this was really bad. Whoever was on the phone had just read the most violent passages of my zine to my mother.

She hung up the phone and tore into me as I tried to explain. There was nothing I could have said to make her understand.

“You’re a disgusting pervert.” she said through drunken tears. “I want you out of my house.”

I did as she asked. I called my dad and asked him to pick me up. He took me to my grandmother’s house, where he was living at the time. It would soon be my new home. That night, my mom called me on my cell phone and continued her verbal abuse, significantly drunker than before I had left.

“I cannot believe I raised you. I am ashamed that you’re my son.” she belched, before I hung up.

The next day at school, I was called into the vice principal’s office. When I got there, he had a copy of my zine on his desk. He turned to the last page and pointed to the author photo underneath my name - the random kid I found on an image search.

He asked me if I was the real author of Heavy Mental.

For a split second, I imagined a way out of this whole mess. If I claimed mistaken identity, would I somehow avoid whatever punishment was about to come? I quickly ruled this option out as inviable, and copped to the truth. Yes, I’m the infamous Jake Cook.

The vice principal just nodded and told me wait in the lobby of the office. No further questions.

Shortly after, I was called back into the office. He told me I was being suspended for 10 days for distribution of pornography*, after which point I would face something called a disciplinary panel hearing to determine whether I was to be allowed back in school at all.

Ten days passed.

At the hearing, I sat at a table opposite a panel of six people who I had never met, who were given a prepared packet of supplemental materials from my school which included a blurb on my general character from every one of my teachers, and copies of my entire disciplinary history dating back to middle school. This was the case the high school administrators had built against me.

I valiantly tried to defend myself against this panel of sour-faced strangers who hated my guts, but ultimately that was a disaster. Their verdict was clear: I was to be expelled for one full school year.

I was given the opportunity to attend an alternative school during the duration; the kind with a dress code, comprised of other kids who had been kicked out of high school, for mostly drug related stuff. I considered it, but nothing about continuing my educational experience made sense to me at this point, or ever.

So I dropped out of high school in my third year. I don’t say “junior year” because I was actually still a sophomore, after having repeated my freshman year.

My dad, having seen me struggle tremendously in public school for most of my life, supported my decision to drop out, on the condition that I continued working. I told my boss at the BBQ restaurant where I worked that I had a lot more free time now, and she loaded me up on the work schedule. I immediately began clocking 30-35 hours a week.

I finally got my GED in 2008, not that it mattered.

You’ve probably deduced at this point how my downfall occurred. My zine had somehow made it into the hands of someone’s parent, who was deeply disturbed by it, and they made it their crusade to not only alert the school but reach out to my mother personally and let her know exactly what I’d been up to. Was this out of genuine concern for the kid who wrote these disturbingly violent stories? I can only speculate, because I still have no idea who it was. But I can’t imagine they foresaw the amount of chaos this would bring into my life.

The offending piece in Heavy Mental was a reaction to the disgusting behavior I saw from my fellow young men towards our female classmates. I saw girls getting harassed all the time. The story I wrote was me attempting to highlight the violence of that, which at the time felt like it was lost on everyone except me.

A psychologist might say that the piece was also expressing some latent rage I harbored towards my own abusive, alcoholic mother. I wasn’t conscious of that at all, but I wouldn’t rule it out. Whoever snitched on me certainly didn’t seem interested in my inspirations, whatever they were.

Since that formative experience, I’ve developed a lot more nuance in my creative expression. At the time, I was about as subtle as a cinder block to the face. Truthfully, I can’t really fault somebody for missing the deeper message in my poorly written story of sexual violence followed by utter degradation and destruction.

I just wouldn’t have taken it so far as to try to ruin my life.

*Intelligent readers will note that the term “pornography” is legally defined as materials which appeal to the prurient interest, aka stuff that is produced for the sole purpose of aiding masturbation. My writing certainly wasn’t that, and an ACLU lawyer may have said as much. However, even if I had the foresight to bring that defense to the panel hearing, I don’t think it would have changed anything. Some people get the impression from movies that the “outspoken kid” is ultimately tolerated, albeit abhorred, by the school administration, and they’re always just one perfectly worded speech away from putting tyrants in their place and bringing about justice for the whole student population. At least in my experience, that couldn’t be further from the truth. I never got any credit or respect for pointing out how rules were hypocritical or incorrect. They just say “Yeah well, tough shit. Do something about it.” This is something I’ll get deeper into later.

In January of 2020, I was living with my eventual wife Olive and our roommate in East Atlanta, still on unemployment from COVID and working on a concept album about the healthcare industry called Death is Free, which was never completed.

I had been putting out music under the name Seal Pup for a little while and was beginning to feel bored and stagnant with the project. I realized what I needed to get energized artistically was a complete reinvention. It would need to be both more calculated and more earnest than anything else I’d ever done.

I made the decision to start going by Jake Cook for the first time, and to make the most high concept, indisputably amazing music of my life.

We found a nice Casio for $50 at Goodwill. I put down the guitar I had used to write Seal Pup material and started messing with the keyboard and writing new songs.

I already knew keys and had made this switch many times in my musical life to shake things up, but this time I really challenged myself to learn and play the instrument in a way I never had before.

I knew whatever I released next was going to be my first project under my own name and I wanted it to concisely sum up all the dynamics of my life and my entire perspective.

The goal was to make artsy, fucked up pop music that played with and really leaned into heavy contrast.

Succession, the TV show, was airing its last season. We were watching that, as well as reruns of It’s Always Sunny. I had the realization that both of these shows are about unrepentant assholes, followed by a second realization that actually most media is about that.

I started thinking about making a concept album that dealt with what it means to be a bad person. I guess I was imagining I could craft an interesting addition to the monolithic pile of treatises on this subject which stretch back to the beginning of recorded history. Because this work would be about me, and my own personal journey from misanthropic crankdom to…what, exactly? I was figuring it out.

All I knew was the title: J E R K S, all caps, with spaces between each letter to be extra obnoxious.

When an idea appears to me from the ether, I don’t ask questions. I just start walking and feeling around in the direction of where I believe will eventually be a good place to end up.

So I started writing and recording this album I had thought of, about the path of a very disagreeable man into enlightenment and redemption.

Like most album projects, I thought of this as a movie. I knew I wanted it to be a narrative story with a clearly defined arc where the main character is a jerk. The question I had to answer was, how much of a jerk was this person? Is he merely oblivious to the people he harms, or is he full-on sadistic and abusive? And if that’s the case, what could possibly be the cathartic event that spurs the revelations necessary to be in a different place at the conclusion?

What’s the narrative turning point, and why? I wrote all around it trying to figure out.

During the early stages, I had an idea for a photo shoot with one of my best and oldest friends, Noah Orisich. I would dress up with corpse paint and wear a suit. It was supposed to be a juxtaposition of two distinct types of disagreeable humans: business executives and gatekeeping black metal purists.

The shoot went excellent. No surprise when Noah is involved. In his organic and skillful style, he captured everything. There’s a reason I’ve worked with him so much throughout the years, besides our close friendship.

Looking at the pictures for the first time, I started to understand what I was doing.

I had the idea to incorporate the corpse paint and suit outfit into my live shows. The initial idea was that this would be a way to feel like more of an artist, and provoke reactions by doing something unexpected.

The more I wore the paint, the more meaning revealed itself to me. Things I had never intended when I first made the move, as mostly an aesthetic choice.

The black and white representing contrasts. The idea that I was both going my own name for the first time and committing to performance in a way I had never done. The concept of exploring performative depression, and what we do to make our outsides look like our inside. It was all clicking together and coming into focus.

I was playing drums in SMALL with Olive and Samm Severin at the time. We had just released the album, Decathexis. I made the decision to quit the band, partially to focus on this new project I was envisioning.

The last SMALL show I played was at The Earl and I had an amazing time. I wore the paint. I asked Olive if she thought it would be crazy if I started wearing the paint even when I wasn’t performing. It was a whole thing I wanted to start doing.

She said maybe it was crazy, but that she supported it.

I started wearing the paint to other people’s shows, or get-togethers with friends. If people ever asked me about it, I tried to change the subject quickly. I thought explaining it would only make me second guess what I was doing. Interrogating my reasons for doing this felt like it would only block the real answers from being clear.

The motivation was totally obvious to me: it was something I felt like doing, and so it was important that I follow that instinct as an “artist”.

This all felt really vital to me at the time.

In the midst of all this, something crazy happened. White Dog died.

Olive’s beloved dog, who I loved like a son and had effectively adopted, was suddenly diagnosed with lymphoma and given five weeks to live.

Olive was on set for some job that day and I had to tell her. It was awful.

We had been engaged for months but hadn’t told anyone, so we took the opportunity to throw an engagement / “Goodbye White Dog” party. Slightly weird in retrospect, but it felt like the right thing to do.

We both wore white. Everyone gave White Dog lots of love and snacks at the party. I think he had an amazing night.

The next day, by the way White Dog was acting, it was clear that it was time. The following morning Olive called a mobile vet who put him to sleep in our living room while we cradled his sweet sick body.

They zipped him up and we drove him to a piece of land in North Georgia owned by Olive’s family and buried him. It was so quiet and peaceful in the holler that is White Dog’s final resting place. All you could hear that day was me and my future wife, crying and digging a six foot hole for a precious baby gone too soon. I’ll never forget it.

Soon after, I did a show at Waller’s Coffee Shop where I played my set between two big pictures of White Dog placed on easels. I wore all white, like on the night of our engagement party. I talked about White Dog throughout the performance.

I did not wear the paint that night. I didn’t need to. It was on the inside.

The whole thing really fucked me up. I had lost both parents, and was no stranger to grief, but this was different. White Dog never did anything to anybody. There’s no possible way he could have incurred a karmic debt which would justify this sudden sickness and early death. It just wasn’t fair.

Whatever your depressive inclinations, there’s really nothing like a grief. It’s just a big monster that destroys everything.

Without W.D., the house was immediately bigger and lonelier than ever. A black and white cat appeared on the night we got back from the burial. Slightly delirious, we started feeding her and letting her stay in the house. We named her Cow. She was little asshole who bit our feet under the coffee table but we didn’t care. It was nice to feel something besides sad.

That Winter, Cow stayed with us and we fattened her up. In the five months we had her, we never took her for a checkup. She was from the street so we figured she was probably fine.

One day, she got a bad cough out of nowhere. She was hiding in the garage and I went to look for her. When she finally emerged from the darkness and approached me, the look she gave me said everything.

We took her to the emergency vet and were told she was moments from death because of a common respiratory thing.

I paid to get her put down. We left with our new pet in a box. The next day, we buried her in the backyard.

Life started to feel to both of us like a prank of some kind.

After more writing and and crying and processing, it occurred to me that what I was feeling was the key to completing the album which I had been thinking of as my magnum opus.

The cruel scythe of mortality offered the perspective shift my main character needed to get him where he was going for the final act.

My real life paralleled this.

I made it through this period because of the love of my partner. She was also the reason it was happening.

Love begets tragedy begets grief begets love again. Will the circle be unbroken. The black dog of depression hounding me at every turn. The White Dog of love, going from the physical plane of existence into my heart (He got that dog in him).

The contrast. The yin and the yang. The two colors of the corpse paint.

I finally had what I needed.

J E R K S came out in September 2023 and it remains the thing I set out to make; a concise distillation of my tastes, creativity, skills, talents, artistic sensibility and emotional intelligence.

The album perfectly documents how drawing self worth from my exceptional brain power at a young age was both responsible for a lot of psychic damage and sometimes my only salvation.

Through using a loose story structure for a character outside myself, I was able to earnestly relate to others all the ways I learned to be a better human being through love.

The writing process for my most authentic album ever was blood-splattered, visceral and all over the place.

Some careful editing occurred to make the finished product. In the end I cleaved out the most “contrast-y” of the songs. Songs about suicide, abuse, trauma and burying White Dog, but also songs about self-care and perseverance in the face of tragedy which I felt didn’t quite fit into the story I was trying to tell.

Over the past two years, I remixed these songs, retracked a bunch of things, fleshed out a sequence and finally crafted a sister album to J E R K S called S K E R J.

It’s J E R K S backwards, almost. It represents going back to where it all started.

The “White Dog dying” era of my artistic life has come to a close. Olive and I finally got married in October of 2025. A couple years ago we adopted Momo and Woodie, our two tabby cats. They’re happy and healthy and will likely live to old age.

Needing to see the S K E R J project to its completion before releasing anything else has created a significant bottle neck of unreleased material. I’m eager to start turning my focus to these things and getting them out there as soon as possible.

I’ve been doing this music shit since I was a child. Throughout the most violent and formative events of my life, it was the thing that I felt like defined my personhood.

I have no idea where I’m going next musically, but I’ll never stop walking or start asking questions.

Keep an eye out for S K E R J, releasing April 4th 2026.

From Atlanta,

Jake Cook