Jonathan Vance is tired. Tired of rock, tired of pop, tired of country. Tired of music as we hear it.

He arrived in Athens three years ago and has played music for the majority of his life. After growing up in Macon, he bounced between Athens and Atlanta, playing music with various groups in various forms. When he arrived here, he was enamored with the variety and quality of the music scene.

“The sheen has worn off a little bit, stuff sort of sounds homogeneous to me now,” he said. “As varied as it is, these structures are all kind of the same, scales, tones, timings.”

His current “performance entity” Divided Like a Saints has played together for the past four years around Athens, touring intermittently. They stand as a part of an emerging Athens sound, what he calls “experimental pop.”

“At first [the music] was kind of cheesy and progressive, but that didn’t last long,” Vance said.

The band has gone through a revolving group of musicians since then. Vance said at least 30 different musicians have played with him at some point.

They have experimented with an array of stage antics – dancers, lights, painting on stage, using Wiimotes to draw on a projector screen.

In between frequent line-up changes and theatrical forays, their music evolved.

They moved from cheesy to a somewhat political tone, raging against the machine that was the Bush era.

“I was angry about the state of things in the country and the world, but I just realized that being angry about it wasn’t helping, and carrying that kind of essence or mood was just more negativity, and that I could probably better combat what I perceive to be negativity with trying to do something that was positive,” Vance said. And so Divided Like a Saints got happy.

It seems it has grown stale to Vance. He simply wants to create something new.

The current incarnation of Divided Like a Saints consists of Vance on guitar and vocals, John Crandel on drums and Scott Bailey on clarinet.

“We just get together and we don’t even try and develop themes, but we do sometimes, and if we find ourselves getting into a theme we make fun of the theme usually,” Vance said. “Lately I’m trying to let go of having any sense of will in the whole thing.”

It sounds like chaos, and a lot of times it is. Vance said he has given up songwriting and is now focused on a new collaborative method which includes the ideals of jazz improv, song structures of pop on acid and lyrics like “Come on and ride a horse.”

Vance concedes that this might be purely self-satisfaction.

“[This style] can be really lame, to just get together and totally mess around in front of people, but the idea is that we have to start somewhere, and if we keep working at it like that, it can turn into something really, really cool,” he said.

Vance has long outgrown his youthful dreams of money and success in the music business, and seems possibly happier without it.

“(Money) taints it, and we all see that,” he said. “Bands who make it get worse after they make it a lot of the time.”

As for popularity, hopes for that have passed with Vance’s years as well. He is over “making it” in the commercial sense.

Basically, Jonathan Vance is a musician that’s tired. And he is as interested to see where that leads his music as anyone else.

“I want to see where it goes from this point on,” Vance said. “I want to see where it goes just letting it go.”