When John Vesely recorded Awake in a Menlo Park bedroom and uploaded it to MySpace, few imagined the little one-man project called Secondhand Serenade would become a blueprint for the social-media musician. Yet that’s exactly what happened – and in our recent chat Vesely was blunt about how indispensable MySpace was to his career.
Watch the Noise11 Secondhand Serenade interview with John Vesely:
“I literally wouldn’t be here without MySpace,” Vesely told Noise11. “It let artists put music up and actually build a community around it. Fans felt like they were part of the journey, like they discovered you first. That energy created momentum.”
Vesely’s story is simple, and rare. He made Awake as a one-off project, financed with savings and a little help from his dad, then uploaded it. The album’s grassroots success – sold initially direct to fans – drew attention, and within a couple of years he reissued the record via a newly formed Glassnote Records, the label built around artists found in exactly this way. “We built it ourselves in a way,” Vesely said, “but MySpace was the engine.”
There’s a mythology around overnight success, but Vesely stresses it was anything but instant. Fall For You, the song most people associate with Secondhand Serenade, was the last song written for the record and, ironically, not his first pick as a single. “Daniel [Glass] heard the demo and knew straight away it had something,” Vesely remembered. The song climbed slowly but steadily, becoming a radio staple and eventually a defining hit. “It was a slow burn,” he said. “One tour, then another, then the audience kept growing.”
What MySpace provided that radio and labels often could not, Vesely explained, was intimacy. Fans curated pages, chose songs for their friends, and watched an artist grow in real time. “When someone put your song on their page and said ‘I heard it first,’ they felt like an owner of that success,” he told me. That feeling, he says, changed the economics of discovery – and made labels sit up and pay attention.
Vesely is candid about the practicalities too. His manager found him on MySpace; a showcase at The Bitter End in New York led Daniel Glass to build Glassnote around artists like him. “That showcase was the fulcrum,” Vesely said. “There I was with just an acoustic guitar, and fans were singing every word. Daniel saw the connection and that’s how we started.”
Two decades on, Vesely is taking those songs back out – this time with a string section that elevates the raw acoustic originals into something cinematic. “I wanted the Awake anniversary to feel different,” he told me. “It’s still intimate, but the strings just open up the songs in a way that honours what they are while making them feel enormous.”
Secondhand Serenade Australian Tour 2025
• Friday, December 19 – Max Watts, Melbourne
• Saturday, December 20 – Manning Bar, Sydney
• Sunday, December 21 – The Triffid, Brisbane
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