Jason Rogers Country Music

Music: Folk-country traditions of St. John River Valley shaped singer’s first album

Published Tuesday October 6th, 2009
Click here to read the original article

Benjamin Shingler
Telegraph-Journal

At age two, Jason Rogers was already performing Rhinestone Cowboy for his parents and guests in their St. John River Valley home.

Country singer Jason Rogers has relatives in New Brunswick and was recently back to visit.

He played just about anything he could get his hands on – piano, guitar, drums.

“There’s a lot of musical people over there,” says Rogers, who was born in Presque Ile, Maine, but moved across the border as a toddler.

“We had two TV channels, and we didn’t have a lot of action growing up, so you kind of lean towards music.”

His father, who worked at McCain Foods, regularly played piano at the Wesleyan church in

Bristol, where Rogers and his two siblings attended service.

“I grew up with a big, big family, which led us to have more music, too. I wouldn’t even want to guess how
many relatives I had.”

Now 32 and living in Nashville, Tenn., the budding country star released his first full-length solo album earlier this year.

He says the folk-country traditions of the St. John River Valley, and visits to the region’s

Baptist and Wesleyan churches, shaped the gospel-country sound on his album.

“There’s a lot of storytellers up there,” Rogers said by phone from his Nashville home. “Good tales of hunting and fishing.”

Rogers moved to Illinois with his parents at 17, his father was transferred to a post with McCain and spent his early 20s in the outskirts of Chicago and places like Forth Worth, Texas.

Although he continued to play music, Rogers says he grew frustrated after a difficult stretch of band break-ups.

Finally, he decided, “I’m done with this. I don’t want to be the piano player and the singer piano in some other person’s band.”

“That’s when I started sitting down and thinking I would be the singer,” he recalls.

“I decided to just be Jason Rogers and I started writing my own songs.”

At 25, Rogers made the move to the world’s country music capital to pursue a career as a solo artist.

The mentality in Nashville is far different, he says, than back in New Brunswick.

“I have never seen so many singers and writers in my life,” he says.

“You could just about throw a stone and hit a dozen of them.”

Rogers, who married in 2004, still visits family in New Brunswick and was in the province earlier this month to visit his grandparents, with whom he remains close.

“The one thing I can say is that in Nashville you can say you are a musician – no one will even look at you once,” he says.

“Tell that to your uncles that work in the woods and work at McCain, they would look at you like you were a UFO pilot.”

His self-titled album is slowly gaining traction in New Brunswick and beyond but Rogers has greater aspirations.

“It’s putting food on the table and making the car and house payments,” Rogers says of the album.

“I’m hoping to tour everywhere, Canada, the United States, Europe, and play for the soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq.”