Jason Barney Brief Life History

Updated March 24, 2026

Jason BarneyMy name is Talmage Jason Barney. I am named after my Grandpa Talmage A Barney. I go by Jason. My parents are Talmage Dennis Barney and Ann Pomeroy Barney. I was born August 28, 1968. I am married to Traci Ann Michael Barney, the center and anchor of my life. We have four amazing children each with amazing spouses and as of March 2026, seven incredible grandchildren with more certainly to come.

I come from a heritage deeply rooted in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The history and culture of the church are central to our family life and identity. But, far more importantly, the doctrine and faith of the church are central to our conversations, family gatherings, aspirations, purpose, and beliefs. The way I have been raised, faith and family are one and the same, and I have fully embraced that as central to who I am and what I believe.

Family activities, parties, and trips to the ranch have always been full of gospel teaching, testimony, and stories about our Barney, Pomeroy, Robson, Phelps, and Walton ancestors. My great-grandfather Lewis Barney and Francis Martin Pomeroy walked and talked with Joseph Smith in Nauvoo in the 1840s, then crossed the plains with Brigham Young's first company to Salt Lake in 1847. Francis Martin Pomeroy and his son in law Charles Innes Robson I were sent by Brigham Young to settle what would become Mesa, Arizona in 1878 to establish the church in that valley.

Francis Martin Pomeroy is my Mom's great-grandfather, my Dad's great-great-great grandfather. Mormon heritage from Nauvoo to Mesa is as deep as possible on both sides of my family. My whole life growing up, my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents talked and taught always of this heritage and the faith at the center of it. That defines me and I embrace it all, the family, the heritage, the culture, and the faith.

Everyone's life experiences takes them down a different path to faith and their personal relationship with God and Christ. Being so deeply rooted in a family heritage of faith and church history has certainly been a huge influence on my path. However, there did come a time where that was not enough, that I had to make my own choices about what to believe. That belief, that testimony, grew through my growing up years, but sank in deeply during my mission to Osaka, Japan in 1988 and 1989. Countless readings of The Book of Mormon made those words sink deep into my soul and made them the anchor of my testimony. A sacred personal revelation in Tanabe, Japan gave me a witness of Joseph Smith I can never deny. Reading "Jesus the Christ" in Ikoma, Japan by another namesake, James E. Talmage, gave a lifelong personal knowledge and relationship with Christ. That faith is central to who I am and what I live for. It has been a constant presence for me and is central to what I hope for my family and future generations.

See this 2026 podcast with close friend Nathan Gwilliam for more on my faith. YouTube Video Here.

I grew up in Mesa, Arizona, the first five years in a trailer on my Grandpa's farm on University east of Val Vista, then in the old 30th Ward northeast of Gilbert and Brown in Grandview Circle. We moved to Gilbert when I was 15. Meeting Traci at the old adobe church at Gilbert and Elliot was one of the first things that happened when we moved from Mesa to Gilbert, and unquestionably the best and most important. When our family walked in that first day, her Mom told her she would marry me someday. We were close friends all through high school. It took me about a month after turning 16 to get my first speeding ticket and lose the keys to my Dad's 1946 truck, Little Red. After a few days back on the bus, Traci started driving me to school in her hot rodded black 1969 Super Sport Chevelle with the rumbly 396 big block. Lots of fun times. We started dating seriously around ten months before my mission and became inseparable. She waited for me and was an extremely close and central part of my mission experience, an amazing shared blessing for us that remains foundational to our life and marriage.

When we got married six months after my mission, Traci and I moved back into that same trailer on the family farm next to Grandma Barney. We moved back to Gilbert in 1995. In 2019 we moved to Lehi, Utah to be close to all of our grandkids who live there. Along with our faith, our family is everything to us. We go to great lengths to center our lives around being with them including leaving our deep roots in Arizona to be in Utah. We still get back to Arizona regularly to see family, for my business, and to be in my recording studio.

Jaci and Jessica were born when we lived in the trailer. I was going to school for music and teaching nearly 80 piano students a week while Traci was doing hair out of the kitchen in the trailer. Joshua and Austin were born after we moved to the house on Heather in Gilbert in 1995. In 2002 we moved a few streets south to a house on Tradewind. Those years were full of trips to the ranch, camping in Greer with a trailer, trips to San Diego and Newport Beach. In 2014 we built a house a mile and a half away on Sawyer then on to Utah in 2019.

Music composition, production, education, and technology have always been very important to me. I use music to advocate for faith and freedom. I was the music director of the Gilbert Temple Dedication and Cultural Celebration, music producer and composer for the Reflections of Christ Photography and Music project with Clyde Bawden and Mark Mabry, the Hear Him broadcast with Clyde in 2020, and numerous firesides and other productions. My studio is used by others like Rob Gardner and Richard Talbot to create inspiring music such as Lamb of God, Cinematic Pop, and the Mesa Easter Pageant. For many years I was the music director of Gilbert Constitution Week producing headline artists such as Lee Greenwood, David Archuleta, Alex Boye, and others. I composed The Fortress Stone, an Anthem to the Constitution for that event with help from fellow organizers Jared Taylor, Bill Norton, and Barb Stowell.

Although my faith and family are the most central to what defines me, my love for music is also a very core part of who I am, what drives me, fills my imagination, and brings me joy. My entire life I've devoured anything and everything I can about sound, sound equipment, musical instruments, and most of all the music that gets made with them. Jazz and classical are my favorites, but I love most every other kind of music. If it is innovative, if it has soul and human grit, I'm drawn to it. I have thousands of CDs and I keep a running list of concerts I've attended because that is so important to how I define myself.

My mind is full of the intricate web of the DNA and interconnections of music from Bach to Beethoven to Mahler to Shostakovich to Duke Ellington to Miles Davis to Johnny Cash to the Beatles and so on to a huge diversity of music I am constantly fascinated by. I am moved most by Mahler, Shostakovich, Stravinsky with Mahler's 2nd Symphony about the Resurrection being the most important piece of music to me. Watching Bernstein conduct that finale at the Ely Cathedral in 1973 transports me to the highest rooms in Heaven. I cannot count the times when I am listening to a great symphony and it is as if I am swept up into the heavens and my mind's eye can see beyond the eternities as a result of the music that lifted me there.

Chick Corea, Miles Davis, Keith Jarrett, Pat Metheny, Brad Mehldau, Michael Brecker, Snarky Puppy, and so many others in jazz inspire and move my heart and mind deeply, I can't get enough. In high school I drove around in my Dad's 1946 truck called "Little Red" cranking Van Halen, Boston, Supertramp, Styx, Kansas, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Count Basie, Chopin, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Grover Washington Jr., Bob James, and Maynard Ferguson.

In fifth grade I attempted to build a recording studio in my bedroom by stringing together cassette recorders, a guitar amp, a cheap Radio Shack microphone, a boom box, a late seventies Casio keyboard my Dad got from the church, my saxophone and my guitar. I daydreamed incessantly about a huge mechanical machine that could play all of those instruments at once long before MIDI was a thing. All of that very much culminated in building a recording studio in 2005 and 2006 where I have lived out all of those daydreams with complex arrays of synthesizers, computer-based instruments and sample libraries, and best of all real and amazing musicians in my studio. Talmage Studios has become the place where I and several others in the local Arizona music community go to create inspiring, sacred, and uplifting music.

My first love and learning of music came from my Grandpa Talmage Barney. He played saxophone and was bandleader of a dance band. He would take me up to his cattle ranch near Christopher Creek for a week at a time to work the ranch all day, then learn the saxophone at night. Grandma Clarene was a different but equally important inspiration. She loved music. She had an old electronic organ in her house with drum sounds and many other instrument sounds. My earliest memories are sitting for hours at that organ experimenting and exploring. That was clearly a precursor for the rest of my life with keyboards, synthesizers, MIDI, and computer-based music production. It was certainly inspiring that fifth grade mind that invented a huge band and orchestra mechanical contraption in my head. I had many important piano teachers all those years. My school music teachers were everything to me. Larry Baedke at Poston Junior introduced me to jazz. Phil Hatler at Gilbert High Band was and is a father figure to me musically and personally. I was a hard core band kid and absolutely loved it. I was in every possible ensemble. Bill Bitter, Orchestra and Band, was deeply inspiring to me. These men were massive in the world of Gilbert and Arizona music education and I was in their programs in their very early days.

After high school, I served a two-year mission in Osaka Japan from 1988 to 1989 from Nara to Sakai to Tanabe in Wakayama. The spiritual and scriptural foundations I gained on that mission are massive and defining. My love for Japan, the people, and the culture is also massive. Not a day goes by that I don't think or speak in Japanese and dream of going back. Traci was very much a part of that mission with me.

I got home in December 1989 and we were married June of 1990. I went to Mesa Community College (MCC) to be a business major. But, I was also teaching piano lessons for income. That first semester, fall of 1990 after we got married, I started taking piano lessons from Ruth Yandell at MCC in order to be a better teacher myself. I also took music theory classes with Roger Harris. That previous spring semester I had taken a music appreciation class with Grant Wolf. I had also begun a jazz history class with Don Bothwell. Before long I would end up in a fusion band and other ensembles with Fred Forney along with Grant's Big Band. Between Grant, Fred, Ruth, Don, and Roger, by fall of that first year of being married I knew that I needed to be a music major, not a business major. In hindsight, that was exactly what I was supposed to do. I have no end of gratitude for those people. The things I learned from them have found their way to being top of mind every single day of my life since. I use and build on that constantly in life and in musical creative efforts.

After MCC I went to ASU (Arizona State University) to study classical piano and jazz and get a degree in instrumental music education. Again, the professors there were spectacular and life defining. I decided to keep going to get a masters in music theory and composition. I loved every minute of that. Amy Holbrook's two semester deep dive course in the history of music theory was one of the most amazing and consuming adventures I have ever been on. Glenn Hackbarth, Ellon Carpenter, and others in theory and composition, Rayna Barroll Aschaffenburg in piano, Chuck Marohnic in jazz, Barrie Wells, Robert Fleming, Richard Strange. Student teaching with Sally Pullen, Joe Lloyd, and Mike Wilson. These were incredible years of ravenously devouring any and all musical knowledge I could get my hands on.

Music Education is incredibly important to me. I have no end of gratitude for the music teachers that have given me so much. Go here for more about those incredible teachers, the importance of music education, and my advocacy for teaching music, including a 2025 podcast with my close friend Jared Taylor (Part 1) (Part 2) about my views on Music Education. I am particularly proud of receiving the Raymond G. Van Diest Music Advocacy Award in 2012 from AMEA (Arizona Music Educators Association) for my work with Gilbert Music Matters.

For more on music, my studio, and music education, go here:

In 1997 I started working on a dot com startup called iTOOL. I was in my final semester of a masters degree in music theory and composition at ASU. Financial pressures of raising a young family (including a new mortgage) and the window of business opportunity of this new world of the Internet brought me to that incredibly difficult decision. It was gut wrenching to step away from music and put what music gear I had at the time in the closet. It was an incredible experience to be in the middle of the Internet changing our world so dramatically, and making lifelong friendships. I had early exposure to computers and programming. In 5th grade, I was in a class that taught us how to dial up the mainframe using a rotary phone and a teletype with a dot matrix printer. I learned the beginnings of programming using the BASIC programming language. A few years later a carpet dealer gave my Dad a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A computer that saved data on a cassette recorder. I spent hundreds of hours over several years learning to program that not realizing that some day I'd build a business on what for me at that time was just curiosity and fun. I've always leaned hard into computers and tech. I often have as many as 3-5 computers at a time and push them a lot harder than they can go.

Vintage video from iTOOL:

After selling iTOOL in 2000 to a newly formed public company in Seattle, Onvia, I began working with my father and brothers in the land development business. We have carried on that business since my Dad's passing in 2009. I spent many years with his long time Circle G partners Ray Olsen and Gerry Ricke with Wendy Lillycrop. Very personal to me was working with our Queen Creek cousins, Newell, Katherine, Gail, and Kenny Barney to develop their farm. I was able to develop many great projects including Barney Farms, The Ridge at Ladera Trails, multifamily, hotel, industrial, retail, and many other master planned communities. I would eventually partner with John Hartman with High Bridge Land to work on new projects. While I'm not obsessed with land development like I am music, I love it, I'm good at it, and find it extremely rewarding to drive around and see people and families making a homes and lives out of something I built, in some cases over the span of multiple decades.

Development Related Links:

I am a patriot. I love America, the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, and the Freedoms that embodies. I have written extensively on www.PendulumBalance.com and www.Righteous-Dominion.com about my beliefs in freedom, The Constitution, and limited government. D&C 121:39 and opposing Unrighteous Dominion is at the core of my belief in what defines good government, principles I learned at a young age from my father. While the song I wrote "Come See The Light" and Behold The Man define my spiritual foundations, Fortress Stone is an anthem I wrote that defines my beliefs about Freedom and the Constitution.

Faith and Freedom Links

Building things and developing land into beautiful places for families has been a blessed and purpose driven way to make a living. Faith, family, and freedom define and drive me. Music is central to advocating for those foundations as well as a source of pure and constant joy for me. But, of all the things that are most important to who I am, I am husband to my wife Traci, father, and now grandfather, trying to be a Disciple of Christ, and hoping to lead my family to Him. Everything else I do, working, providing, defending freedom, and creating beautiful places and music, all that is a means to a greater end: to strengthen my family and help build Christ's Kingdom. We had many wonderful years raising our kids. Now we are blessed as each of them has married an amazing spouse, each bringing incredible joy and purpose to our family. Each of the seven (and counting) grandkids are everything to us. Making sure each of them knows they are loved both by us and by God and Christ is the whole point of everything we do.