Ayron Jones

The guitar hotshot on Hendrix comparisons, the price and perks of fame, and wanting to "not just be a great musician"

- Polly Glass

Ayron Jones never knew his parents, but he thinks about them a lot. “They never saw me play guitar,” he tells us at the Royal Albert Hall, where he’ll open for Daughtry later. “So I carry them with me as I go out there.”

Formerly a child of Seattle’s foster-care system, Jones began playing guitar in bars at 19, and turned heads in 2021 with Billboard chart-topping single Mercy. Tours with the Rolling Stones and Guns N’ Roses ensued, lifting him into rock’s new elite. Now 36 and a father of four, Jones is gearing up to release new album Chronicles Of The Kid. A commanding firebomb of heavy riffs, stunning solos, hip-hop and pop sensibilities, it’s a deeper, darker and more dynamic follow-on from debut Child Of The State.

“There’s so much more to me,” he says. “I want to be our generation’s guy. We don’t have a guitar player; we don’t have that one guy that everybody can just get behind. I want to be that guy.”

You describe Chronicles Of The Kid as a “journal of selfdiscovery told through tales of temptations, triumphs, failures, sacrifice and the price of fame”. When was the first time you felt famous?

August 2021, I was at a gas station in some nowhere fucking place, and that was the first time somebody was like: “Oh, hey, you’re Ayron Jones!” Then I was in Paris in a room of people who all know my songs, the press is all on the front row… It hit me like a ton of bricks. One day I’m sitting on my couch, a relatively unknown artist, to all of a sudden being one of the bigger artists on the Billboard charts.

On the song Otherside