“You taste just like honey on cornbread,” croons 28-year-old queer singer-songwriter Jake Wesley Rogers in the opening verse of “God Bless,” one of 11 songs on “In the Key of Love,” his debut full-length album, released last Friday.
That juxtaposition of sweet sheen and rough grain, of the ambrosial and the earthy, is typical of Rogers’ lyrics. It also aptly describes his vocal versatility and, on this new release, the brazen gush of production topping his warm, well-turned melodies.
The Missouri-raised, Nashville-trained artist’s four previous EPs (“Evergreen,” “Spiritual,” “Pluto,” and “Love”), which brought him attention and praise from elder icons Elton John and Brandi Carlile, leaned into country-, folk-, and gospel-tinged pop.
Those influences are all present and accounted for on “In the Key of Love,” but the album also finds Rogers stomping onto glam- and art-rock terrain, collaborating with producer Mike Sabath to incorporate synthesizer flourishes, vocal distortions, and anthemic marching beats. The influence of Queen is unmissable.
In a recent video interview with the Bay Area Reporter from Los Angeles, where he moved in 2022, Rogers said that in many of his earlier coming-of-age compositions, “I wanted to paint a picture of young queer love in the Midwest and in the South.”
Now he’s building on the bildungsroman-esque with an eclectically expanded sonic palette and describing his new work as incorporating “a very explicit celebration of queerness in all forms, not only just LGBTQ+ but in the classical definition of queer as ‘strangeness.’”
“Living in LA,” Rogers added, “you just need to walk down the street for 15 minutes and you’re liable to see some of the strangest things you’ve ever seen in your life.”
A song held onto
Rogers composed ten of the songs on “In the Key of Love” after moving to Los Angeles, but there was one tune he’d been keeping in his back pocket for three years.
“I wrote ‘Mother, Mary, and Me’ after graduating from Belmont College in Nashville, and I just knew it was for my first album. I’ve put out a lot of music between then and now, but this song I never released or even recorded.
“I had dated a guy in college and after graduation he was about to move across the world. I sort of knew our relationship was over, and that’s when I wrote it. It felt like an almost supernatural experience. I felt very led in the process, like I was supposed to sit down at that time and write that particular song. There’s no other song I’ve ever felt compelled to write to that degree so immediately.
“But since then, the song has come to mean a lot more to me than just getting over that relationship. Now, it’s about letting go of all that we cling to, letting go of all the things in our life that, even if they might make us feel comfortable and secure, just aren’t serving us anymore.
“We think, ‘I need this person,’ ‘I need this substance,’ ‘I need to buy this,’ ‘I need to identify as this.’ But we really need very few things.
“I held on to that song and it sort of ended up being the theme for this whole album: Letting go of everything except for the true unconditional forces of love.”
Generational art ache
“Mother, Mary, and Me,” like many of Rogers’ songs, incorporates lyrical references to Christian tropes. But while he did attend church during his childhood, Rogers now describes himself as deeply spiritual and philosophical, but unaffiliated with any organized religion.
Ironically, among the texts that Rogers turned to for spiritual fortification during the same post-college period he wrote “Mother, Mary, and Me,” were the “Harry Potter” books, a touchstone of his queer generation.
“The first movie came out when I was four years old,” he recalled. “So, these are stories that had been with me for my whole life. I was really sad, and I hadn’t read the books since I was 12, so I went back to them because they were comforting to me.”
Rogers, whose own mother and father were unequivocally accepting when he came out to them in sixth grade, said he felt the Potter series “spoke to so many young queer children. I kind of feel like queerness is this mystical superpower that society doesn’t understand, and that people feel they need to hide. There are so many parallels to queerness in those books.
“Then, right around the time I reread them in 2019, the news [about J.K. Rowling’s public anti-trans positions] began to come out.”
Rogers, who writes lyrics like, “God bless the straight man in a dress…God bless the trans-kid from Texas” and whose gauzy, glittery stage wardrobe celebrates gender fluidity, says, “It felt like being stabbed in the heart. Where do I stand now? Let me put it this way: I have very fond memories of the stories.”
Hitting the road
The release of “In the Key of Love” was significantly delayed when Rogers, who has Crohn’s disease, was hospitalized for more than a month last summer, ultimately undergoing surgery for an intestinal rupture.
Now fully recovered from the procedure and with his Crohn’s in remission, Rogers is celebrating his new album, but perhaps even more excited about returning to the road. He made his Bay Area debut with a stunning, Bowie-esque show at Bimbo’s in 2023 and returned later that year opening for Kesha at the Fox.
“Recording music is actually not a natural thing for me,” he said. “I don’t love technology. At home, I don’t have any special equipment or studio monitors. I have a piano, I have a guitar, and I have the voice memo app on my phone. That’s how I write.
“I’m so proud of what we’ve done with the album, but I’ve always been more of a live creature than a studio person,” he said. “I love the experience of performing my songs for an audience. That’s how music has been listened to for at least 40,000 years. We’ve only been recording it for 150.”
Rogers will return to Northern California as a special guest on the final leg of Cyndi Lauper’s farewell tour this summer (Toyota Amphitheater, Wheatland, Aug. 23; Shoreline Amphitheater, Mountain View, Aug. 24). A solo tour will follow later in the year.
http://www.jakewesleyrogers.com
