If you’ve attended a Vampire Weekend, Paramore, or Hayley Williams concert in recent years, you might recall Brian Robert Jones on guitar, flaunting a prominent Afro on stage. When he isn’t serving as a sideman for some of the scene’s strongest alt-leaning pop-rock acts, Jones has been pursuing a colossal personal project.
Now Jones unveils Weezyana: The Louisiana Purchase Musical, an almost two-hour audio expedition tracing Thomas Jefferson’s life. It unfolds across 42 tracks, featuring Broadway-caliber numbers alongside narrative passages that strike me as Veggie Tales in vibe. It’s categorized as “comedy” on streaming platforms, and given the premise, it’s easy to read it as a non-rapping send-up of Hamilton. Yet Jones maintains a stone-faced delivery throughout, even when delivering a prologue about alien civilizations—the Garlaokans and Vulbarians—or introducing Napoleon Bonaparte “pooping and farting loudly atop a gaudy golden toilet.” He clearly didn’t skimp on the music, either; this project genuinely sounds like musical theater. And there’s also a cameo by Hayley Williams.
Here’s Jones’s note about Weezyana on Instagram:
This is a concept album. It will tell you the whole story of the musical with songs and plot summaries in between each track.
I sing all the lead vocals (lol) and I’ve assembled an amazing cast of friends to help me shape the ensemble’s sound.
It will be available on all streaming platforms, but the recommended way to experience it is the long-form lyric video on YouTube, which includes captions you can read along with and runs about two hours (lol); gather your friends for a watch party this weekend and dive in.
You may wonder, given the project’s title, whether Louisiana’s own Lil Wayne plays a role in the story. You’ll have to listen yourself to find out. (Translation: I haven’t reached that part yet, so I don’t know.) Check out the lyric video below.
Weezyana is out now on LXIX Records.
