Photograph by Matt Kelly from Halfway Home

Jordan Krimston: “The San Diego all-ages and DIY thing is spotty.”

If you heard Jordan Krimston’s history of playing in bands, you would likely assume he was a grizzled, local music scene vet in his mid-50s. The 23-year-old has played in more groups over the past ten years than most musicians do in their entire lifetimes. He started while he was attending the School of Rock and has since been involved with bands such as Big Bad Buffalo, Band Argument, and Weatherbox. Since most of these years were spent in the “underage” realm, Krimston honed his skills playing at house parties and all-ages gigs.

“I definitely feel lucky to have gotten a head-start,” Krimston explained. “I’m grateful to my parents for kind of kicking me in this direction. The San Diego all-ages and DIY thing is spotty sometimes because there aren’t that many venues, but I feel it’s pretty accommodating. It was great to grow up with venues like the Che Café and just house shows. I feel like the DIY scene in San Diego goes through lots of waves. There’s a lot of turbulence with it, but I do feel like it’s always been pretty strong — especially when I was in high school. It was a pretty great asset.”

After releasing a solo EP in 2019, Krimston began work on a full-length follow-up in December of the same year. He continued to write songs through January of 2020, and then recorded what would become Bushwhacking the following month.

“February 2020 — the most cursed month of all time,” Krimston explained. “We were so oblivious. It was the calm before the storm. I was like ‘I’m gonna have this record, and I can play shows supporting it,’ and then Covid.”

Touring plans got squashed the next month when the country entered shutdown mode. Coincidentally, another one of Krimston’s projects, Miss New Buddha, released their debut LP The Situation is Excellent on March 15, 2020 — a maneuver that now seems akin to dropping an album on the same day that your neighborhood is getting nuked. The good news, according to Krimston, is that the Miss New Buddha album has done so well on Bandcamp’s digital download front that a vinyl edition is now in the works. As live shows are an actual possibility in the coming months, Krimston must begin to coordinate his schedule so that all the bands he’s currently playing in can count on him being available for their gigs.

“That has definitely proven to be an issue in the past,” he explained. “I have multiple things that I’m committing to, and it’s hard to juggle them. For the most part, it’s doable because we’re all sort of in the same friend circle and we’re all very communicative with each other. We’re pretty good about lining that stuff up, but I’ve had to choose certain projects over other projects in the past which I hate doing. Sometimes I just have to decide one route or the other.”

All that being said, he refers to the logistical conundrums as “a good problem to have. I’m slowly getting better at juggling it. I’ve ironed it out a little bit.”

Besides The Situation is Excellent and Bushwhacking (which are both out now), Krimston is currently at work on debut LPs by Crasher, Somme, and Band Argument, and another debut (this time an EP) by Glow & The Dark. He is already getting moving on a follow-up to Bushwhacking and playing on what will become the second Future Crooks album and the fourth Weatherbox LP. He expects all of these to be available “within the next year or so.”

So, if you notice Krimston dragging a bit during a gig in the hopefully near future, give the kid a break. Playing in eight different bands will do that to you.