Jackson Culp was in the woods at night when Louisiana finally revealed itself to him. Not metaphorically — literally. He and his band were somewhere in the trees outside West Monroe, shooting the music video for DOWN HONEY, getting bitten by things they couldn’t identify, hearing an owl they never caught on camera, and briefly losing the car keys in the dark. For a moment, standing in the humid Louisiana night with wildlife moving around them in the dark, it felt exactly like a horror movie.
Which, for Jackson Culp, was kind of the point.
DOWN HONEY is the lead single and opening track from WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SKULL BOY?, his debut full-length and the third chapter in an interconnected gothic mythology he’s been building since 2021. The album examines a once-powerful, decaying character who enters an arrangement he doesn’t fully understand — and the music video puts that mythology exactly where it belongs: deep in the Louisiana night, following a light into the trees, not entirely sure what’s waiting on the other side.
Culp wrote, performed, produced, mixed, and mastered every note of the album alone in his West Monroe studio. He also directed the video. When it finally dropped, the relief was immediate — and hard-earned.
“It seems like every project I’m involved in recently is kind of like a test,” he says. “I’m trying to push myself, so getting to the finish line can prove increasingly difficult. But when this video came out, it really was total relief — because I didn’t know if it was going to be finished.”
The difficulty wasn’t a setback. It was the work. Culp has come to understand pressure as a creative force, something that shapes the final product in ways that unlimited time never could. “If I just had all the time in the world to sit and tweak, it’s much more about having that pressure on you that influences the final product. When you watch it back, you can see why that decision was made right there.”
DOWN HONEY itself took years to fully materialize. It started as two chords on a ukulele around the time of his 2023 EP — no chorus, no clear direction. The song that exists now bears little resemblance to that starting point. A relentless three-note synthesizer emerged one night during a recording session and lodged itself into the track. The bass, which Culp has loved obsessively since his Abbey Road revelation in 2021, found its place. The pieces came together not because he heard the finished song in his head, but because he kept following where the puzzle wanted to go.
“I didn’t hear Down Honey in my head. I didn’t really hear anything. I was just like, let me try to see where I can go with this thing.”
The music video carries that same spirit of discovery. Culp edited it himself, thinking carefully about rhythm and restraint — quick cuts giving way to long, uninterrupted shots, the absence of movement becoming as deliberate as the movement itself. He was influenced by a scene from an obscure horror film he watched the previous summer: a single flash of light across an empty western gold rush town that gave him chills without explanation. That image — a light that beckons you toward something unsettling — became the visual logic of DOWN HONEY.
“I wanted it to be like you almost can’t tell what’s happening, but you know you’re walking into something. That’s the entire theme of the album. You don’t know what’s happening, but you’re walking into something.”
Louisiana didn’t consciously factor into the album until people started asking him about it. Then the lightbulb went off. He remembered staring at trees at night, listening to wildlife, feeling the thick summer air and the creeping awareness that human beings are not, in fact, running the show out there. The forest belongs to something else. That realization is baked into every second of the DOWN HONEY video.
“When you go outside at night in the summertime in Louisiana, the air is so thick and heavy. I started to realize — oh, Louisiana inspired this whole thing.”
Away from the mythology, Culp is in a period of genuine artistic expansion. He’s been absorbing John Carpenter films — The Fog lit a fuse — and recently discovered Dario Argento’s Inferno, a film he describes as wild but compelling. He’s been listening to more instrumental music, picking up Henry Mancini records, exploring sounds that have nothing to do with rock and roll on the surface but carry something he wants to bring back into it.
He’s also been quietly rethinking what he believed art was supposed to be. A decade ago, he was drawn to tortured artists, convinced that sadness was a marker of depth. He no longer buys that.
“I believe it’s easy to be sad and write a sad song. I think it’s incredibly difficult to write something that’s hopeful and inspire hope in people. That’s so much harder.”
He credits Paul McCartney — naturally — with the shift. The Beatles’ ability to move between Yellow Submarine and something devastating, between absurdity and weight, showed him that range isn’t contradiction. It’s power.
The Skull Boy, for his part, is not finished. Culp was burning the midnight oil the night before we spoke, working on new music. The tape machine — a thrifted TEAC A-2300S reel-to-reel that gave WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SKULL BOY? its crackle and warmth — has been serviced and is ready to run again.
“He’s wanting to stay,” Culp says of the Skull Boy. “His ultimate desire is to be who he once was — ultimate power, ultimate influence, everything. But he’s been around for way too long. I’ll give you anything, is what he’s thinking.”
The sequel, it seems, is already in motion. The arrangement continues.
Jackson Culp is 25 years old, recording alone in West Monroe, Louisiana, building a mythology one reel-to-reel pass at a time. WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SKULL BOY? is out now — and if the midnight oil burning and the freshly serviced tape machine are any indication, the Skull Boy’s story is far from over. Follow where the light leads. You might not know what’s waiting on the other side, but that’s the entire point.
Direct to You.
