Jazz-Pop artist aron! is doomscrolling, yearning & “Too Close For Running” in lieu of upcoming album release
Photo Credit: Meredith Truax
aron!, the modern artist, pulls musical influence from the past to create a timeless sound on his debut album, “Too Close For Running.” In his soft spoken cadence with funny anecdotes sprinkled throughout, aron! details his musical process and personal development that shines through his new project.
His 2025 jam, “table for two,” caught listeners’ attention, including that of John Mayer.
“Points for originality, points for making the music you have in your heart,” Mayer said about the aron! tune on his SiriusXM channel. “Points for making a Bossa Nova – points for making a Bossa Nova sounds like pop music. It’s as good as it gets!”
Mayer also shared his love for the 2026 single, “Wonderful Thing,” which appears as track 11 on the album.
The John Mayer praise has been “crazy” for aron!
“They felt insane,” he said. “I basically came out of the womb listening to John Mayer, so yeah, it's insane, and so many of my songs have been influenced by him. I don't want to be influenced too much, but yeah, it's also crazy getting to the level that he's at and being like, ‘let me just listen to young, upcoming people's music, and then talk about it on my radio show.’ It's very nice and I like that mindset of like, ‘oh, he's reaching down and like helping the little guy.’”
aron! never thought one of his songs would reach 1 million streams and now “table for two” has hit over 5 million on Spotify.
“I was very content playing music in bars,cover songs, for the rest of my life, but I was very happy. I made this thing that I like and other people like it too. This album also… I hope that people will like it, but it's kind of different from ‘table for two.’ There's hints of it, but it's cool to me when each project has its own vision, and I'll probably go back to the ‘table for two’ thing at some point, but it's a little journey. “
“We're too close for running, we just gotta go with it”
Out on Sept. 18, aron! shares the feelings behind releasing his first LP with the world.
“I've never released an album, so this will be scary,” aron! said. “But it's gonna be okay because what I love about it is that it’s not about me anymore…It’s so just about the people who are listening to it. It's cool. It becomes their own thing.”
“I'm excited for people to hear it. I'm excited to hear everybody's thoughts, whether they like it. I'm excited to hear when they don't like it, too. It's equally exciting.”
aron! likes when albums reflect on a particular stage of an artist’s life, which is what “Too Close For Running” is to him. The album title is a nod to combatting what could be self-sabotage or avoidant attachment in relationships.
“For this, it's like I'm kind of down bad, falling in love, you know? Maybe in the past I used to be more nonchalant with it where if things are getting more intense where it's like, ‘oh, I feel like we might have feelings for each other,’ then you start running away. It's like, ‘now we can't do that,’ but now it's like, ‘oh, we're too close for running.’ We just gotta go with it.”
Making “Too Close For Running” came with more personal surprises for aron!
Photo Credit: Meredith Truax
“One thing that surprised me is after a session, this sushi place called Sushi Gen in LA, so yummy, but if I had to give a non-sushi related answer, it would probably be it really helped me figure out what I'm super uncomfortable with, and one thing I'm uncomfortable with is being vulnerable. However, in order to write good songs, generally, you have to be vulnerable. And so that was kind of a deep process for me of being like, ‘Oh, I would never say this in real life. I can say it in a song, so I can do it there.’ That was kind of the thing for me. This whole record is pretty vulnerable and risky for me.”
As much as he continues to evolve personally and musically, orange fruit still makes an appearance on the album cover and tracklist. The album cover art depicts a clementine, the title of track seven, on top of aron!’s head with an arrow through it.
“It's from this William Tell thing. I think the original story is this dad has to shoot the apple off of his son's head, but my dad wasn't doing that in this version. I'm more thinking of it like I'm being hunted by Cupid. Cupid's got the arrow, and it's like, ‘Oh, you're gonna fall in love. Cupid's gonna catch you.”
aron!’s relationship with social media, fellow artists & “spiraling in a good way”
A self-proclaimed doomscroller, aron! shared his thoughts on how social media has taken the pressure off of artistic collaboration.
“I think Instagram is weird, obviously. I am a doom scroller and that's one part of Instagram I don't love. One part that I do is there's like a low stakes way of getting together with people and we get to make a thing – somebody I've never met – and we make a thing and it's low stakes. It's so creative and yet maybe in the past there wasn't a thing like that. It wasn't like, ‘Oh, let's get together and make a video.’ It's like, ‘Let's get together and write a song.’ But that's a lot. It's just nice and low stakes, and I think low stakes are sometimes pretty good. Bringing that into collaborating like really singing and everything with dodie and Mei, it's just the coolest thing for me because I listened to both of their voices so much and their music, and hearing my voice and theirs in the same song, it's like, ‘what's happening?’ It’s crazy, it's so crazy.”
dodie is featured on the romantic song, “Call When You Can,” about a couple finding the time to call. Despite the palpable chemistry on the track, the current age of technology made the synergy happen virtually.
“With dodie, we actually were not in the same room for any of that recording. It’s just I had a song, I left a verse blank for her. I actually had a fake stand-in verse that I'd written and was singing it and said funny words, words that I thought were funny , and she sent back her singing the words that I had written, and I'm like, ‘No, dodie. I want dodie words.’ She wrote some nice dodie words on it. That one was really fun, and I like that song. It's cool, and she's playing some clarinet and I'm playing some clarinet.”
The song, “Macramé,” features Mei Semones, an artist who first connected with aron! online. He recalls the first tim they ever collaborated.
“Originally, I had written a song about her, and I was like, ‘Do you wanna be on it?’ She was like, ‘Sure.’ And so she was just gonna sing and not play guitar, and I'm like, ‘No, you have to play guitar. You have to make them crazy guitar parts,’ so we did that.”
When writing “Macramé,” aron! had been "spiraling in a good way.” The song itself feels like him thinking out loud. As he puts it, “fantasizing about living with someone and building a place together, like decorating the room from scratch. It's like, ‘oh, we get to decide where we put everything.’ That was the main thing that was in my head, and there's a lyric video that is actually that literal thing that's kind of showing that. But for the music video, it's just so fun and playful and I like small things. It's like, ‘oh, it feels small.’”
The current cyber climate is definitely a double edged sword for artists. Musicians have the opportunity to make new songs without sharing studio space. aron! also owes the rising desire among young people online to become jazz club regulars to TikTok!, Laufey and La La Land.
“It’s such a cool shift in culture. I think what it actually is modern culture and things are getting a little scary. It's like AI music, it's just like, ‘woah, woah, I want humans,’ and maybe the most human genre of music is jazz, so I think it's cool that people are returning to that and it's fun to be a part of that.”
“Find a midpoint between Lady Gaga and Fitzgerald”
aron! pulls musical influence from several genres, which is especially evident via track five. “Not For A Lack Of Trying” feels like a fusion between Dirty Projectors’ “Break-Thru,” Jordan Rakei and Michael Bublé.
“I just think jazz is in everything to various degrees, like even if you listen to Ariana Grande, Harry Styles…like all that stuff has little hints of that,” aron! said. “Because of all this history we’ve accrued as humans and are layering on top of each other. A lot of the stuff that I love is from the 40s, and so in this new record I'm kind of taking some bits and pieces of that. But then I just like old love songs.”
Aron!’s affinity for legends like Thelonious Monk and Frank Sinatra are apparent in his jazzy tones, but he doesn’t seek to box himself into one genre.
“I love the sound of these old recordings. However, if you wanna hear that, you should just listen to the things that are made then, you know? There's no point in me recreating the past. I need to add something new to the pot, you know? So a couple ways I do that are like using different words today. Maybe I'm not singing about Nightingales. You can write with different words. Sometimes I'll mention a phone…and the way that things sound, it's like a mix. I like the old stuff. I don't want to sound exactly like Lady Gaga, so you kind of find a midpoint between Lady Gaga and Ella Fitzgerald.”
Like many other artists, aron! is ready for his next album, something he’s been discussing with fellow musician and friend, Liana Flores.
“She's also releasing a project and we have this feeling of like, ‘I just want to do the next thing,’ you know? But then also, when I listen to this album, I'm like, ‘wow, I kind of forgot how it sounded,’ because I just waited a month after the master. Now when I hear it, I'm like, ‘Woah, this is cool. Yeah, I’d probably listen to this.’ So that's fun. I'm just amazed that it all kind of sounds like the same album, which I didn't think it would.”
He hopes his human art inspires other humans to make their art, something he believes is “very very good for the world.”
The 13 tracks on “Too Close For Running” will be yours soon and as John Mayer said about “table for two,” “I’m sure you will find it as frothy and invigorating as I do.”