Jacob Theriot is Living in a ‘Gremlin World’

As Jacob Theriot, otherwise known as Jaco Jaco, appears on my laptop screen for our interview, a large image of a random, blonde-haired man looms behind him. 

“That’s my friend, Crowbar,” he tells me. “I have that exact photo as a sticker on the back of my phone.” 

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Apparently, Crowbar got his nickname from being the “muscle” of his friend group, the person who made sure nobody tried to pull any funny business when picking up stuff they bought on Craigslist. 

He insinuates the photo’s an inside joke. It’s also a metaphor for the quirkiness emanating throughout Jaco Jaco’s new album, Gremlin—a playful, elegant record that, though you’d think it was, isn’t directly inspired by the movie Gremlins. 

“I haven’t even properly seen it,” he says. “It was put on during Christmas one year, and I watched it then, in between getting second helpings of fixings.” 

Instead, the album title came from the line, “We’re living in a Gremlin world” in the album’s last track, “Gremlin World,” which was itself inspired by the image he uses for his Venmo account of what looks closer to a snow Yeti than the creatures depicted in the 1984 Joe Dante horror comedy. 

The weird character, who Theriot vaguely remembers might have come from Japanese pop culture, has been a constant companion for him; his muse, if you will. 

Gremlin is Theriot’s second solo album, preceded by Splat, which he released in 2024. This was a couple of years after Sports’ fourth record, Get A Good Look, which just so happened to be the first time he sang lead vocals while in the trio with his older brother Christian and childhood friend Cale Chronister. 

“I typically would keep my songs with vocals to myself,” he tells me. “I was a little timid and I would mostly contribute just instrumentals and send over those tracks to Cale to figure out vocals, or we would figure them out together on a couple of the tracks every once in a while. But…I did vocals on three songs and I just felt like, oh, I guess I can do this.”

Theriot confesses that Sports started to feel a little bit like “a too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen kind of thing.”

So, right when the COVID pandemic began, he quit the band to pursue a solo career. While the news was shocking for Christian and Cale, Theriot says it was also well received. “It feels good now to be confident in that decision.”

Together with his girlfriend, Theriot moved from Oklahoma to Philadelphia, where he now resides. Moving to a new city, it turns out, helped shape the intimate, quiet, even lonely feeling reverberating throughout Gremlin. Each song is like a conversation in his head, he tells me. 

“Since moving to Philly, I feel like I’ve become more of a loner, which is good for making music, I think,” he says. “Not something I like to do on purpose, but I think a lot of it has just been me and being in my head. And the lyrics kind of come across that way as like a stream of consciousness kind of thing. I’ve got a friend who just was telling me that it feels like I’m channeling something.”

Perhaps, I suggest to him, he’s channeling the gremlins in his head.  

“Yeah, the gremlins can be outwardly, and they can be inwardly,” he responds with a chuckle. “I feel more of a connection to these songs than I did before. And I think it’s mostly just because it’s coming from a deep feeling that I don’t even fully understand.”

But Theriot’s new album wasn’t just inspired by his move to Philly or the mischievous make-believe creatures first derived during the 1920s to explain aircraft malfunctions. His love of Les Blank documentaries such as Burden of Dreams and Gap-Toothed Women also played a vital role in the wonderfully strange world of his Gremlin album.

In fact, we have a whole conversation about Blank’s short films—I wasn’t familiar with the director until this interview—and the simple, humble, and sometimes odd people he focused on. “I think that’s what draws me to them is just people that are so unapologetically themselves and they’ll stop at nothing to do what they have to do.” 

But what really stands out to me, and makes this album so unique, is Theriot’s use of kitsch and camp, so clearly inspired by Blank’s films, many of which were filmed between the 1960s and ’80s. He clearly has an appreciation for weird, retro art and analog filmmaking, complete with practical and stop-motion effects.

“I just feel like that whenever it’s handmade, there’s a certain human element that is lost whenever something is too computerized.”

Sonically, the eight songs on Gremlin—particularly “What’s It Like in the Sunshine,” “Woman,” and “Favorite Kind of People”—captures that period but in a modern way; a little funk, a little psych, a little dreamy ’70s AM rock with a playfulness that doesn’t distract from the prevailing mood of irreverence and introspection, a slight underpinning of nostalgia that’s warm and inviting. 

Theriot recorded a majority of it by himself in Philly, and had Chad Copelin, a trusted collaborator from his time in Sports, contribute drums and overdubs. 

On the aforementioned “Gremlin World,” Theriot completely reworked the song after recording it, adding trumpet, an ode to the instrument he played in sixth grade. “It was crunch time, and I had a little bit of time because I was waiting on getting mixes for another one [song],” he says. “I was like, let me just open this one up again and see what happens. And then last minute, I ended up completely changing the whole song for the better, I think.”

To really give “Gremlin World” a gremliny vibe, he added a little surprise at the end, something I don’t want to spoil here because it made me chuckle in the best of ways. 

“That was also kind of a joke,” Theriot tells me as we wrap up our conversation. “I put that in there, sent it to my mixer, and he was like, ‘Yeah, we’re keeping them.’ I smile every time I hear it, so that means it’s good.”

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