Interview | Ronnie Kessner

Since I’m calling you from our home state of New Jersey, I gotta ask you about your newest graphic for April, featuring the Barnegat Lighthouse on it. My parents took me there as a kid and we had a big tapestry with that on it in our house growing up so I recognized it immediately. Do you still feel connected to the Jersey Shore even after moving away?

Oh yeah, of course. Throughout my life, after moving out to California and traveling a bunch, the one thing that's stayed consistent is just trying to remember, where I'm from. It’s such a small place but it’s special. It meant a lot having the lighthouse on the board because I grew up going to class trips to that thing and I used to stay on the island in the summer for like six years in a row. We would always find ourselves down at the lighthouse so was I was stoked that we were able to get it on a board and pay homage to that.

I’m sure by moving to San Diego and then to Long Beach, it must feel somewhat similar to be living along the coast. Would you agree?

Yeah, I've kind of always lived near the water. When I first moved to California, I lived in San Diego for a year, and then I lived in Long Beach for like seven years. We lived two blocks from the beach in Long Beach and I think that's what I liked about it so much. You could wake up, hit the bike path and pretty much be on the beach in the mornings. Or you could save it and go skate up in LA and then come back and then do that in the afternoon. It's always felt grounding in a way.

I feel like you need to be able to experience that change of pace to get away from the chaos of the LA.

On another note, are you sick of people asking you about the Jersey Shore MTV show after they find out that you’re from the area?  

It doesn't happen as much anymore but when I first moved out to California, that was a common thing for sure. My name is Ronnie and I'm from the Jersey shore so that was that. 

I actually never watched it growing up and I didn't know anything about it because I thought it was wack. Years later, my girlfriend and I ended up watching all of it and I got sucked in and was pretty invested.

Shout out to The Situation!

Speaking of guidos, I hit up fellow South Jerseyan, Joey Marrone, before this interview and he referred to you as a “make it perfect kind of guy.” Would you consider yourself a perfectionist?

I think so. I feel it always gets in my way though because it's hard for me to feel satisfied - especially these days after doing a lot of tricks that I've always wanted to do. I'm getting to a point now where I'm like, “all right, things just have to be done well.” I always have been like that though with filming and stuff. I'll go back and redo a trick a ton of times.

Well even further back, he said you always had a 4.0 GPA and if you ever got a B, you were super bummed on it so it sounds like it’s always been that way. 

Pretty much. Throughout high school I did have a 4.0 but it was mainly just because if you had straight A's and you got an A on the midterm, you didn't have to take finals. I would just dread finals so every year, my mentality every year was like, “if I can keep straight A’s, I'll have more leniency to be able to travel and skate throughout the school year.

Can’t argue with that!

That was kind of a deal I had with my principal. He was super cool and pretty much understood that I didn’t play any school sports but I was fully invested in skating. He was really supportive of it so they would work around all my absences and everything to make sure that I was technically still going to be there enough days to graduate.

Grades were like a big thing with my parents but it became more of a personal thing to think “oh my God, I'm going to have to take the final.” It was just more time that I didn't want to have to give to school.

In the interest of skating, it seems like it worked out. You also moved across the country almost immediately after you graduated, right?

Yeah, I drove out to California maybe four days afterwards. I think the car was already packed when I graduated.

That's nuts. I moved out about two weeks after college and even that felt like it was super early. 

Looking back now, I didn't know anything. I moved to San Diego thinking that’s where I needed to be. Within a year, I realized “oh, wait, I think I need to be in Long Beach." Especially at that time, Long Beach was like popping. There were so many kids that moved to Long Beach during that time, like the whole Florida boom with Jamie Foy, Tyson Peterson, Ish Cepeda, John Dilo and all those guys. They were all out there at the same time and we all had this common goal of trying to get up and go skate every single day and film and make things happen. When I was first in San Diego, I didn't really know, what was going on.

It seems like all of us out-of-towners learn to figure things along the way and that’s how we end up checking things off the bucket list.

I had also read that you were originally interested in becoming a chiropractor but wanted to make the most of your time in the prime of your life to skate. Do you still feel like these everything is going to plan in that regard? 

Yeah, I feel like everything's been going great. I feel the best I've felt in a long time, actually. I’m 29 now so I've been trying to be consistent in terms of paying attention to my body and how I'm feeling/not trying to overdo it these days. I’m trying to find that balance of listening to my body but then also trying to film all the time. 

I still feel like I have a lot to give to skating as far as what I think I'm capable of. I'm really stoked on the footage I have right now and where things are going. I don't know, I'm just going to ride it until I can't anymore. 

In every clip you film, it seems you’re doing tricks the cleanest they could possibly be done. Would you say that style means more than trick selection to you?

I don't really pay too much attention to style for myself. There's going to be times I do tricks and maybe I don't like how I land them so I’ll redo them and I guess that's a style thing, but I'm more of a spot person. I pay more attention to spot selection than anything. 

I think growing up on the East Coast and then moving out west, I have a huge fascination for East Coast skating. I spent a lot of time in Jersey this year, and I just feel so much more fulfilled when I get a trick at a spot that's got a lot of character. Whether there's bricks or its a colonial rail and the spot's really old -  it just feels more satisfying to skate that rather than a perfect sidewalk in LA where everything's gray and it got built within the last ten years or something. I feel like for me, it's more of a challenge to find the trick that works at that spot and then I feel like with that comes style. Picking a cool spot is 90% of the battle. Like, getting this spot to be skateable and traveling to get there and all this stuff.

That's a real East Coast answer right there - appreciating the crust more than the actual trick itself.

For sure. There are definitely times when I have a crazy idea and I can't just go film it on some ledge in Trenton. I have to get a perfect ledge to be able to do some of those tech tricks. But that's the sacrifice I feel like you have to make if you're going to go down that rabbit hole and try to these crazy ledge tricks. You need to find the perfect one.

I know you’ve spoken about going to a bunch of different cities to hunt for the right spot for the kickflip back smith Tre flip out from your last NB# ‘Cherish” part but I wanted to ask you about another spot in there: that bump to bar that you tre flipped over. Were you the first one to fix that spot up?

That spot has been around forever. My brother, who’s almost 50 now, was skating that spot so long ago when he was growing up. His friends took me there when I was little and it used to just be a bump to flat and people would skate off the side back then because the bank was pretty crusty. Now it's fully cemented.

I think the ground might have been really bad, so people would just jump off the side of it. Then I think they repaved the ground when I was around 15 or 16. I went there and filmed a trick a long time ago in an old video part where I skated over the flat of it. I noticed some other people had skated over the flat too. There used to literally be a six inch bar on it. It was so tiny, I don't even know why it was there.

I moved to California and then years later, they put these really tall bars on it. They were so tall, it was pretty much only possible to ollie it, which I think Joey [Marrone] did. I just kind of thought, “oh, it's not skateable.” Then I went and looked at it one day because it was when I was filming that last project and I was like, “I'm just gonna go see what's up with that thing.” We looked at it and I was like, “man, you could fully make a bar out of this thing.” I knew as soon as I cut it, I couldn’t tell anybody because everybody was going to come it was going to be blown out.

So I brought a pipe cutter and I cut it down. Originally I had been trying to tre flip two different bump to bars so that was my goal. I was hopefully going to cut it just low enough to where it was still a challenge but I didn't want it to look too low. I measured it a little bit higher than I was originally going to cut it, then I went back the next day, It’s one of one of those bars where it has like these loops on each end so if your board hits it, it gets knocked down a bit lower.  That was a huge pet peeve of mine because I wanted it to look as level and as normal as possible. So I did it but I didn't tell anybody for a while. 

Then a photo got ran and all of a sudden I was seeing stuff all over Instagram of everyone going there and skating it. Multiple photos were ran and I was excited because I was able to get my trick and then everybody else went and skated it and cemented the bump to make it even better. It's like a launch ramp. 

But I will say, I went recently and it looks terrible now. The bars are bent like crazy and it looks like it's been through hell but yeah I cut that thing and resurrected that spot again. Hopefully they do something else to that spot, in the next couple of years and then we can give it a third life.

It’ll be a real spot renaissance.

Yeah, I think that’s what's cool about South Jersey. It's so fun, revisiting old spots and knowing that nobody has skated that stuff in so long. Maybe there’s one or two local kids that are still skating it but the skate scene is so scarce down there that, growing up, there were people ahead of me that were skating these spots and it was kind of inspiring, you know? 

Nowadays I go down there and I'm like, “oh my God, like, look at this thing. It's fully overgrown, like no one's looked at skated this thing in years.” It's so exciting because you feel like you just rediscovered this thing. In LA or New York, it’s like no stone is left unturned. Everything's been sniffed out and skated already. I think that's what's super cool about NJ, there’s a lot of hidden gems that still need to be seen.

Agreed. It seems like you’re doing the part to keep things moving down there, especially with that SOV Takeover event you put on in Atlantic City last year. Would you say the scene is the most active it’s ever been at this point?

From what I know about when my brother was growing up, there was a decent scene in Atlantic City and South Jersey in general. Over the years, it’s fizzled a little bit because a few really good spots were demolished. Obviously there's not as many indoor parks and stuff like that, but I do feel like over the last few years, Jason Klotz has been doing a great job with Skate AC. 

In the summer, they have events pretty much every weekend at SOV. And now, they've got this new skate park approved and built so now there's two skate parks down there. He's done a really good job at keeping kids stoked because he's doing skate lessons and he's constantly talking to the city to get them familiar with the skate culture that's in Atlantic City and to let them know, it does exist. These kids need somewhere to go and something beneficial to do something with their time. 

Skating teaches you so many things so that’s why I wanted to help fuel that fire and bring some pros down to South Jersey and make it easy for people down there for once, instead of making everybody drive to New York or drive to Philly. Only a fraction of  those the kids actually going to be able to drive to those cities and do that so it was cool to bring the party to South Jersey for a weekend.

When we throw the event, my whole family steps up because I don't think I realized how hard it is to throw an event. I was like, “I'll just do this, you know?” My sister is always out there handing people raffle tickets and everybody just takes it upon themselves to start helping out. Donny [Miller] from The Shack Boardshop in LBI  always comes down and lends a hand. Also Ben [Jones] and Brannon [John] from Kinetic always pull up and help any way they can. It’s just really sick to see everybody stoked that there's an event going on. It’s cool to see everybody come together and at the end of the day, we get the kids a bunch of boards and shoes and get them stoked until the next event.

You have to go out of your way to make things like that happen because if you don’t, no one else will.

It's been really positive. When come home and I go to Meg's DIY a lot and this last time, I ran into a that I remember from about seven months after my event. He had a pair of New Balances on and he was like, “yo man, I got these at your event, thanks so much.” He was still skating the shoes and it was so cool to see the effects in real time like that.

Aside from my work with the magazine, I have the same feeling any time I see someone skating a board that I know that they bought from a shop that I sold it to. It’s rad to know that people actually go out of their way and care about the things you create.

It’s such a trip. I didn't really think about that stuff until I turned pro. Then you're trying to sell a board and you're getting messages from kids with photos of them on their wall, you know? It makes me want to cry because they cared enough to buy one to hang up and one to skate either because the graphic means something to them or maybe they just wanted to support a skater.

If it’s any consolation, I showed my mom your lighthouse graphic and now she wants one!

Aside from skating, the last thing I chat about was the music side of things. Out of all the skaters that make lackluster songs, your song “8 Weeks” is actually right up our alley. How is the rest of your demo coming along? 

I will say, it’s hard. You want to put your head down and get stuff together to finalize it and put it out and everything but for a while, I struggled with trusting my ability because it’s still something new. It's just hard to balance skating, life and then also doing music but it's coming along. 

I do have about 70% of an album done so I’m still trying to fill that last little remaining bit the best way I can. I would love to get something out in the next couple of months. It's been a while since I put something out. 

I started making music and when I put that single out, I don't think I expected anything. I ended up getting a lot of feedback and I started working with these managers that were were trying to help me dive in. I feel like at the time, I wasn't ready. I was like, “man, this is scary” It was turning into something that I didn’t know if I was ready for. With skating too, I wasn't really where I wanted to be. I had just gotten a surgery so I think I needed to take skating seriously for the next little bit before entertaining the idea again. 

I took some time off and now I've been recording a bunch of different demos at home. I feel like there's about seven or eight that I'm pretty happy with. Long story short, we're getting there. Hopefully in the next couple of months, I can like put out a record and actually make vinyl and stuff.

It seems pretty involved to track all the different instruments by yourself rather than having other people to jam with and to bounce ideas off. I could imagine it feeling a lot scarier to get everything out of your own head and into the world.

Totally. I think another battle I had (which I’m a little bit more at peace with now) is being collaborative. I wanted to fill that blank space that I couldn't fill by myself through working with other people and having their input but I don't know. I think I'm going to lean on myself for this first project at least. I feel like if I work with other people, it just wouldn’t feel as personal. I want it to be something where I tracked the base, I tracked that snare roll, I tracked the open hi hat - literally everything. I wanted to do myself. 

It's more of a challenge, but I've come to terms with that and that’s given me a lot of freedom to just sit and write whatever I want instead of thinking that I'm not good enough at playing piano or something like that. I’m at peace with making whatever I can make now and putting it out to use that to get the ball rolling. If collaborating with somebody afterwards is the move then maybe that's what I'll do.

I did see a lot of comments comparing you to Mac Demarco and he’s the king of recording all the instruments at home by himself as far as I'm concerned. Is he an influence to you or are there any others you wanna shout out?

I feel like early on he was definitely a big influence because the whole idea of doing it yourself was really cool to me. I didn't even know you could do that. Nowadays, there's a lot of artists that do themselves. Kevin Parker from Tame Impala does everything himself, which is insane.

Lately, I've been listening to a lot of Richard Hawley and Mk.gee has also been a big one. Those have been my two go to’s.

Last question to settle the score for everyone reading this in the Garden State: Bruce Springsteen or Bon Jovi?

Probably Springsteen.

Photos: Brian Panebianco, Adam Reid, Jake Daren & Bailey Schreiner

Originally published in Issue 7 - December 2025