I’m James Priestner, but I go by Jamesy Boy in the band and amongst friends. We started back in 2018! My older brother Jared and I took a vacation together to the Caribbean, and since he’s a decade older than me, I wasn’t 100% sure what we were going to spend our time doing. I was writing songs and playing in a different band at the time, so I suggested I bring my guitar, we drink a beer or two, and try to write a song together. Being the big thinker he is, he said, “A song!? Eff that, let’s make an album!” Sure enough, 10 days later, we wrote the first 15 RA songs. We barely even went to the beach! The songs were different in style from the band I was in, so we decided to start something from scratch, and that’s how RA came to be.

After five albums, our fans know to expect the unexpected: no two songs are alike. This diversity could stem from our varied influences or our instinctual approach to music. We just try to approach every song as its own little puzzle and follow our guts until we think we have something cool. There’s a huge mixture of influences from punk, to folk, to hip hop.

Novak Djokovic, Muhammad Ali, Tim Armstrong, Yuval Noah Harari, Isaac Brock, Alex Turner, Eminem. As I said, they are all over the place!

We’ve all been caught in a maddening game of cat and mouse. You want this person so bad, but the more you show it, the more they pull away. Then, just as you give up, they come crawling back. Frustrating, right? This was based on a true story. We made a great animated music video for it, through the eyes of Hank, a fan-favorite character in the Rare Americans lore.