Senior Jude Fucetola dropped his first single, “I Don’t Want to be Your Lover Anymore,” in January, 2021. After thousands of Spotify streams, another single, and multiple live performances, Fucetola is dropping his third single this Sunday, Oct. 3.

Fucetola began his musical career on the piano 15 years ago. While developing his skills at School of Rock, he discovered he had perfect pitch and started learning songs by ear and performing at venues around St. Louis. Soon enough, he had picked up guitar, bass, and drums and played jazz piano at Jazz St. Louis.

“I’ve been songwriting since I was 10,” said Fucetola. “But during that time I started producing and recording music. I picked up guitar, bass, drums, started singing, and started recording my own music, and that eventually got released in January of 2021.”

Fucetola now creates music under the title J. Anthony. After the tremendous success of “I Don’t Want to be Your Lover Anymore,” Fucetola made his live solo performance debut at Art Fest, a concert put on by 21Artistry this summer.

“Doing the live show this summer, me and a lot of other up and coming St. Louis artists kind of really gave a spotlight to the St. Louis art scene,” said Fucetola. “Me and the guitarist who played on my stuff ended up running it with (Philip Hiblovic, ’21). And we kind of had the idea to just bring out more visual artists and jewelry makers and all these kinds of people. Yeah, it turned out great, we're gonna do more of that kind of thing.”

It was also over the summer that Fucetola found inspiration for his upcoming single, “Digital Damage.” He came up with the lyrics of this dystopian song while taking music classes at New York University.

“I just started writing lyrics, like in the middle of a Zoom class, and I thought of the phrase radio waves,” said Fucetola. “I don't know why, but I kind of went with that. And then I ended up making the song about the pressures of social media, and how people are kind of controlled by screens.”

With the opening line “radio waves take over my head space,” Fucetola centers the song around the idea of the internet creeping into our lives.

“I made it about the negative impact of social media and how living in our social-media-based society kind of sucks, especially being a teenager,” said Fucetola.

After completing the track, Fucetola gave himself a month to promote the release of Digital Damage. He has posted frequent Instagram stories, videos, and even a portion of the lyrics on his page. To accompany the song, he has released art and photography of people with TV’s as heads.

“The whole TV head idea, I thought that'd be like a cool visual, just like people's heads are kind of, you're not seeing the natural kind of face of someone, you're just seeing a screen,” said Fucetola.

As for the structure of the song, it follows a similar indie-pop feel as his other two singles. It features mainly drums, guitar, and bass that he recorded with a little help from a guitarist in New York.

“It’s kind of like a drive with the windows down kind of song,” said Fucetola.

The single is highly anticipated by Fucetola’s fans across St. Louis, including some SLUH students.

“He’s really good at coming up with hooks, melodies and stuff, really good harmonies and good jazz,” said senior Cooper Scharff. “I’m really looking forward to it, I know he’s a super talented, super intelligent musician and I can’t wait to see what he puts out.”

After releasing this single, Fucetola says he will have more content coming soon before the end of the year.

Jack Figge, Editor in Chief, contributed to this article.