Jake Wesley Rogers
Last month, singer-songwriter Jake Wesley Rogers put out his first full-length album. Next month, he’s hitting the road to open for the final leg of Cyndi Lauper’s farewell tour. Needless to say, he’s booked and busy — but he recently found himself in a sweet spot of downtime. Ahead of his performance at the annual Nashville Pride Festival, Rogers spoke with the Scene via video call about his recent adventures in songwriting, artistic independence and living in a kind of musical postpartum.
Rogers stands firmly and unapologetically in the dazzling identity he’s created for himself. Some critics have deemed him the present-day Elton John — Rogers is a stellar pianist who has a knack for crafting pop songs whose big emotions and dramatic crescendos feel thoroughly organic — and he’s become good friends with Sir Elton in recent years. Raised in Missouri, Rogers is a Midwesterner by birth. He’s now based in Los Angeles, but is no stranger to Music City, having graduated from Belmont University in 2018 and lived in Nashville for five years. He wrote the very first song for what became In the Key of Love, released May 9, on his childhood piano in his small basement apartment on Music Row.
That song, written seven years ago, is “Mother, Mary, and Me,” a poignant ballad that Rogers describes as the cornerstone of the album. In the intervening years, he’s released a few EPs and singles. But since his 2022 EP Pluto, almost all his effort has been focused on In the Key of Love.
“I’m a little perplexed on what I’m supposed to do now that I’ve spent three years preparing to put out an album, now that it’s out,” says Rogers. “I feel like I gave birth and I’m figuring out how to take care of the baby.”
While the album was gestating, Rogers was able to easily distinguish “little projects” like singles from work that would be part of the record. During the songwriting process, he was free to unequivocally express himself while also maintaining the artistic integrity he had to fight for in the past.
“I was just in a place of really being so hungry for going deeper, and feeling the call artistically and spiritually to go further than I’ve ever gone,” he says. “And I think I did that. I think I might have gone too far at moments, but I made it back.”
Though Rogers didn’t sit down with a concrete album concept until after he moved to L.A., he laments the creativity that he sees bleeding out of Nashville and migrating elsewhere. The dedication to musicianship has kept him coming back, so much so that he recorded quite a bit of Key of Love at the historic Sound Emporium Studios on Belmont Boulevard.
“If there’s one thing that I appreciate most about Nashville, it’s that it still is a place where art wants to be made,” Rogers says. “There’s like a life force of creation and people who want to come together to make beautiful things. … I think I’ll always come back for that.”
On Sunday, Rogers will return to his college town to help close out Nashville Pride. He’s performed at a few Pride festivals over the years, including many times in L.A. But Pride is a different experience in a place like Nashville, a blue dot in a red state.
“Playing Pride in L.A. is fun because there’s just so many of us there,” Rogers says. “But also, queer people are everywhere. And in a place like Tennessee and the South — and the Midwest, where I’m from — there’s so much more vulnerability in our community, and specifically the trans community.”
He encourages folks to interact with kindness and find a way to tune themselves back to the frequency that they exist best at — what he describes as someone’s personal “key of love.” In bringing his music and motifs back to Nashville, Rogers hopes to send a message to the queer community: You are not alone.
“Pride almost feels more important in places where it doesn’t make as much sense, because it’s a reminder to everybody that we are here, and we are your neighbors. And we’re not really asking for that much, at all.”
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