Jason Webley

Jason Webley is an American musician known for his fusion of folk, experimental, and alternative music.

Webley plays the guitar and accordion, sometimes providing percussion by stomping or shaking a plastic vodka bottle filled with Coins.

Webley began his career performing solo, but has collaborated with a wide range of artists.

He has also organized several commemorative concerts and events memorializing everything from tragedies in his hometown of Everett, Washington, to tomatoes.

Webley is originally from Everett, Washington.

In high school, Webley played in a punk rock band called Moral Minority.

He once owned a late 1990s model Toyota Corolla that had been converted into a giant tomato.

It was painted red, and had a green fiberglass stem attached to the roof of the car (until the stem was stolen).

He picked up the accordion in 1996 in his last year in college at the University of Washington when he was part of a performance of Bertolt Brecht's play The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and wrote a couple of songs for the play on the accordion.

He later recalled, "I was just a geeky kid; accordion came later. It's since playing accordion that I've become cool. I used to be a geek with an electric guitar. I had a guitar and played in punky bands and I had a computer. I sequenced stuff. I was much geekier."

In the spring of 1998 Webley quit his day job and began busking.

Later that year he recorded the album Viaje in his kitchen and independently released it.

In 1999, Webley released Against the Night, which would become one of his most popular albums.

Against the Night includes "Last Song" and "Dance While the Sky Crashes Down," which would be staples of his live performances for the next two decades.

Webley's first four albums were released or re-released by Springman Records, but he now owns his own record label, Eleven Records, and sells his merchandise via website or at concerts.

Webley plays various instruments on his albums, including guitar, accordion, piano, marimba, and glockenspiel; when he tours, however, he usually only brings his guitar, an accordion, and a vodka bottle filled with Coins from around the world.

He has been known to do short tours with a backing band.

Webley has performed at several festivals, including Burning Man, Glastonbury Festival, VanFest, and the Oregon Country Fair.

His sound has been compared to Tom Waits, Vladimir Vysotsky, Leonard Cohen, and Bob Dylan.

Webley's music and live performances reflect his eclectic personality.

Webley has a fascination with the number 11.

References to the number can be found throughout his discography.

From 2000 to 2004 Webley pretended to die every Halloween only to be born in the spring.

He also performed a special commemorative concert on November 11, 2011.

Webley was also once known for incorporating vegetables into his performances.

He reported at a concert that his beloved Toyota had "passed away" around January 18, 2011.

Webley's vegetable fixation is no longer a main element of his live performances.

In 2011, Webley scaled back his touring schedule and started focusing more on other projects.

He still performs annually at some venues such as the Oregon Country Fair.

Webley organized the Monsters of Accordion tour, an all-accordion extravaganza that took place on the West Coast.

The tour came together when Webley was invited to play at an accordion shop in Oakland, and met two Bay Area accordionists, Daniel Ari and Aaron Seeman.

They decided to do an accordion-only tour, which was the first Monsters of Accordion.

The tour has since featured such accordionists as Corn Mo, Geoff Berner, Amy Denio, Mark Growden, (former Gogol Bordello member) Stevhen Iancu, and Eric Stern (frontman of Vagabond Opera).

In May 2014 Jason Webley performed the songs 'Promise To The Moon' as well as 'These and More Than These' by Joseph Fink; while doing a series of live shows with the show Welcome to Night Vale, as well as writing an original song as the character Louie Blasco on the podcast.

In 2014 Webley released, Margaret, a collaborative album commemorating Margaret Rucker, the daughter of a prominent Everett family.

The album was sparked by Webley's fascination with Rucker's pyramidal tomb and his friend's discovery of one of Rucker's scrapbooks in a California dumpster.

The album was released along with a book and six live shows were performed up and down the West Coast.

The project was funded via a Kickstarter Campaign.

In 2016 Webley once again turned to crowdfunding to co-create an album centered on Everett's history.

This time the focus was the Everett Massacre.