Lebanon musician Tim Jesiolowski releases second End of Silence EP

The act of being a musician these days falls into a few categories. Those who strive and toil to be the next big thing, who record and tour vigorously. Those who are content to periodically make and release music and play the odd live show. And those who firmly stick to their garage and keep their creations to themselves.

Tim Jesiolowski, of the band End of Silence, falls somewhere in between. The band released its second five-song EP, “All These Things” in January, 10 years after releasing their first five-song EP.

A decade between releases

“My motivation wasn’t really to gain listeners or create content or whatever people do nowadays to create awareness around this stuff,” Jesiolowski, 52, said in a phone interview. “I tried to promote it a little bit through posts on social media and I realized I’m just not good at that. 

“I sent an email out to a bunch of people when I first released it and the feedback was great from people who had known me for many years and had listened to our other stuff. But there wasn’t an organic thing, like a resurgence of End of Silence – there never really was a huge following.” 

His motivation for the latest EP was threefold.

“I really didn’t write the songs for anybody but myself, to put them out there and have people hear them,” he said. “I didn’t want to be one of those people that just wrote songs and had them sitting on my computer – I wanted to release them to the world.”

And since, as he said, “I’ve lived in this area for so long and been a part of the music family around here and jammed with different people, I felt like this is my little way of giving back to this community.”

And then there was turning 50.

“I started thinking about my mortality,” he said. “I want my son to be able to hear this stuff and be able to go, yeah that was my dad.”  

The band behind the music

Jesiolowski plays guitar and keyboards and co-produced the EP. He’s joined by singer Trevor Schubert, bassist Jeff Lawrence, and drummer/percussionist Ed Piccolo.

He explained the band’s arc.

“Back in 2015, when we first recorded the first five songs, that one just came out of me,” he said. “It was like these songs and these riffs and these ideas have been boiling around in my head for years and I finally met these guys that helped me bring them to fruition.”

Another two songs came the following year – “it was just a matter of striking while the iron was hot and the ideas were flowing,” he said. 

“(But) throughout the next 10 years, that band kind of just fell by the wayside as other priorities took place in my life and those guys were involved in lots of other musical projects,” he said.

He’s not the kind of musician who constantly has “ideas that are always brewing in the back of my head and the need to get them out and share them with everybody.”

“(There was) no real impetus behind it other than the fact that I felt this feeling within me to just put this art out there again,” he said.

“The first release of music for me was like I’ve gotta leave a legacy for my son – he knows I play guitar, but there’s no proof of it anywhere. This second time around, it was like I don’t really have anything to prove. I have songs and ideas and I want them to sound exactly how they sound in my head in everyone else’s ears.”

End of Silence is “not a working, playing band that plays gigs.”

“I look at it more as a quote, unquote my project,” he said. “They’re musicians that I love like brothers and they help me bring the songs to life. They’re all great collaborators, great musicians. I come up with the riff ideas and those guys help me flesh it out and direct me.”

Even the band’s name itself has a sort of as-needed vibe.

“We started the band in 2013 – my son was born in 2011 – and so there were two years of me not playing any music at all,” Jesiolowski said. “I realized I need to get out and play again, I miss this. 

“They answered my ad (in Pennsylvania Musician) and I said that I was a fan of Henry Rollins and one of his albums was ‘The End of Silence.’ I thought, well, hey, they haven’t played in a while and neither have I, so we’re both ending our silence to play this music,” he said.

A song-by-song breakdown

The EP’s title stems from the title track, but it makes sense on its own, he said.

“For me, it is a bunch of different things,” he said. “If you listen to it from beginning to end, it’s like this kicks you in the face with this song, and then it kind of goes in this direction and that direction. It kind of encompasses all these things in my musical life that led me to this point to create these songs.”

Jesiolowski was born in Philadelphia, but his parents moved to Lebanon County when he was a year old. He lived in the northern Lebanon area most of his childhood and currently lives in Palmyra. He graduated from Lebanon Catholic High School and got his degree in computer networking technology at HACC.

“I was an IT guy for most of my professional career,” he said.

He got into playing guitar, he said, “probably after trying piano and saxophone and realizing that guitar was the coolest instrument ever.”

“I was about 12 or 13 but didn’t get real serious until I was 16, (and then) I ate, slept, drank everything guitar,” he said. “A couple years after that, what compounded my addiction to guitar was working at a local guitar store when I graduated high school. 

“I worked at Creter Guitar Shop (in Jonestown) surrounded by guitars and musicians all the time – it was just what I wanted to do and it really fit that.” 

Influences that shaped his guitar sound

Early on, it was hair metal bands like Poison and Ratt that gave him his first taste of rock music, he said. Metallica’s seminal “Master of Puppets” shifted his taste significantly, he said.

“I realized, what is this stuff and why am I listening to this other stuff,” he said. “It shook my world.”

One of his biggest influences, though, is Alice in Chains, especially guitarist Jerry Cantrell.

“As I went through my whole guitar playing journey, I wanted to be like those fast, thrash shredder guys like (Alex) Skolnick (of Testament) or Marty Friedman (of Megadeth),” he said. “I realized there was no physical way I could play that fast.

“But when I heard the guitar work on Alice in Chains’ ‘Facelift,’ I was like this was like a melding of the two sides of me – blues and metal. Jerry’s approach to lead playing was more emotional rather than fast. His playing made me realize that I don’t have to play fast to really get my point across,” he said. 

Speaking of that title track, Jesiolowski spoke a bit about each song and about the guitar influences that shaped his playing in them:

“That song was inspired by Slash,” he said. “I listen to Slash’s solo albums a lot; I love Guns n’ Roses so much. That is definitely a Slash-inspired riff, and the tone of the sound as well.”

Thematically, it’s “relationship-focused,” he said.

“I think that’s what Trevor was going for,” he said. “To me it’s almost like a passing of an opportunity.”

He said Schubert and Piccolo are the main lyric writers; he admits to sounding like “Dr. Seuss” when he tries to write them.

The guitar riff, close harmonies, and lead vocal of “Naive” were directly inspired by Alice in Chains. Schubert’s lyrics read as sly social commentary. Jesiolowski admits to currently being on “a social media detox.”

“Our brains are developing to handle all this news flying at you all the time, and then there’s those whose brains got broken by whatever and can’t think for themselves anymore,” he said. “You’re naive because there’s a bigger plan at work here.

“We made a decision as a band not to be political because we don’t want to alienate anybody from the art that we’re making, but that one hinged on it and so did ‘Dark Days.’”

And speaking of THAT track, it’s easily the heaviest one on the EP. Which makes sense considering the inspiration behind its guitar part.

“I’m also a huge Danzig fan – the first four Danzig albums are like fully ingrained in my brain,” he said. “The song, ‘How the Gods Kill,’ that guitar work, inspired the lick.”

Alice in Chains and Pantera’s bluesy version of “Planet Caravan” played into the guitar sound in various spots too.

The subject matter of Piccolo’s lyrics reflects the title as well.

“His mother-in-law battled Alzheimer’s and dementia, and during our writing process, she passed away,” he said. “He wrote the song from the perspective of the person with dementia – in their mind, they’re thinking, but we can’t pick it up because they can’t communicate it.

“That person suffering from dementia has dark days too, because they really have no one to speak to or really get their message across.” 

Finding the right producer

On the other side of the spectrum, “Car Knows the Way” is a sharp hit out of left field moodwise, just a blast of pure fun. It’s a lyrical reworking of an unrecorded song Jesiolowski did with a former band, Moonshine Road, about 20 years ago.

“My dad told me when they would be musicians playing a gig, he’d say to his friend, are you all right to drive home?” he said. “And he said yeah, left wheel, yellow line, car knows the way home.

“When I brought it to the guys in End of Silence, Ed (said) this song’s cool, but I don’t like the lyrics. So he rewrote the lyrics from the perspective of a guy that just likes to keep partying from one live show to the next and one bar to the next. It’s certainly not a promotion of drunk driving,” he added.

While the lyrics of the song may have changed, the guitar solo didn’t.  

“The solo that’s on that song was the same one I wrote 20-some years ago,” he said. 

Jesiolowski did have something to do with the lyrics on “12:34,” however.

“It’s a little autobiographical,” he said. “It’s a story of meeting someone at a time in your life when you’re young and then reconnecting later on in life.

“This is where the Dr Seuss thing came into play – I had all these lyrics trying to tell the story and Trevor’s like, why don’t we just boil it down into this and that? And we worked it out to where it is now. It’s a love song to my wife and how we met,” he said.

And with the guitar sound, he says, “I was going for me.”

“I can’t sing, but if I can make my guitar sing and say what I want to say through my guitar, I nailed it. If it’s just a single note that really pulls at your heart, that’s what I’m going for,” he said.

Jesiolowski said he finally achieved his long-sought-after sonic goals for his guitar playing by working with producer Jason Shaffer at Full Tilt Productions in Mechanicsburg.

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“That was the most beautiful feeling,” he said. “I found a producer that was really able to help me tap into that – we just worked so well together.

“It was just like the guy can read my mind. He understood me and my guitar sound. I wanted it to sound like it sounded in my head, really full and pretty, and what you hear is exactly what was in my head.” 

Why playing live no longer fits

As Jesiolowski said, End of Silence is not a live, performing entity. He did his share of performing back in the day, including with the Lebanon band who later became Spinebelt. So getting gigs isn’t a thing. As he said before, “I felt like I had something to prove – now I don’t.”

“I loved playing live – the problem is it’s frustrating because people don’t go see live music anymore,” he said. “Gone are the days where people would go see live music and support local artists. I don’t get the impression people really want to do that.

“I’m an old guy now and I’m usually in bed by 9 o’clock, too. But I think the average music listener doesn’t understand a lot of the emotion and heart and soul that goes into songwriting – I think there are a lot of people that don’t even listen to music. So to put in the effort of trying to play music live is a whole other thing.”

He even nixed the idea of playing a CD release party – “that would be cool if we actually released CDs anymore,” he quipped.

“That’s the other thing: what am I going to do with this music?” he said. “Am I going to spend all this money to put it on CDs (when) no one buys CDs anymore? The world is so weird anymore that I don’t know what to do anymore other than just record my music and put it out there for someone to listen to.”

With that in mind, you can find “All These Things” by End of Silence on Spotify and Apple Music.