From Baseball to Country Music, Jameson Rodgers is Ready For His Turn at Bat
"Some Girls," Rodgers' first single to country radio, is out now.
Batesville, Mississippi native Jameson Rodgers moved to Music City nearly a decade ago, saying goodbye to his small-town life as a college baseball player. When he and a buddy landed in Nashville, he was seeking to become an All-Star for a different sort of Major League–country music. He was confident in his ability, but there was something preventing him from getting the running start in music he had hoped for.
“I literally did not know one person in Nashville when I moved there,” he says about his fateful relocation. “But we were only four hours from home, which helped. I would go back home pretty much every other weekend to keep from getting homesick.”
In the following years, he began to see his musical future could very well be as bright as he had hoped when he stowed his baseball cleats in the closet back in Mississippi. Rodgers co-wrote the sultry R&B-flavored “Talk You Out of It” which became a hit for Florida-Georgia Line in 2018, as well as “I Don’t Know About You” for Chris Lane, which has amassed over 34 million YouTube streams since its release in the fall of 2018.
But Rodgers has also been recording his own albums, independently releasing the Jameson Rodgers EP in 2016, and Jameson Rodgers in 2018. He recently signed to River House/Columbia Nashville, who will re-release his 2018 song “Some Girls” as the first single to hit national country radio in June. Rodgers spoke to Sounds Like Nashville about working as both a songwriter and a recording artist, as well as the benefits of digital streaming and co-writing songs over solo writing.
Years ago, music industry folks often said that to make it in Nashville, one had to choose to either be a writer or a performer, but not both. That doesn’t seem to be your path.
My favorite people on the planet are songwriters. I want to keep songwriters working, but as a songwriter and a performer, I’ve got to take a cut on someone’s album anytime I can, and I need to pick a great song for my records, even if it’s written by someone else, whenever I can too.
Before signing with River House Artists/Columbia Nashville, you independently released a couple of EPs. What has been the biggest difference between your days as an indie artist and the present as an artist with a record deal?
When I released my EPs, I got to do things under the radar without a lot of pressure. My first EP was kind of an experimental deal and I didn’t know if people would dig it or not. That’s not really something you can do with a record label, where you need things to work right out of the gate. It was good to not have a lot of pressure on me in those earlier years.
You moved to Nashville to pursue a career in music. What was that first week in town like for you?
I can remember it like it was yesterday. My roommate from when I went to college at Southern Mississippi, who didn’t really have any other plans, moved there with me, and we didn’t really know what to do when we got there. It’s crazy because I would never do something like that without planning more now that I’m older.
But during that first week, I remember Googling “open mic nights in Nashville” because I didn’t really know how else to find out where to go. I went to every open mic night I could find during that entire first month. I met writers during that time that I still write with today. I don’t think I even looked for a job for the first couple of weeks, just so I could go out and meet other writers.
You’ve had some success with your music finding an audience through digital streaming. What are your thoughts the place of digital streaming in the current music marketplace?
Personally, I love it. Streaming has given me a platform to go and play shows and let people discover my music that wouldn’t have ever been able to otherwise. When I was in high school, I would have to go to Wal-Mart to find new music. If you didn’t have a CD in Wal-Mart, I didn’t know who you were, so all the different digital streaming platforms are great for new artists because you don’t have to worry about getting your CD into Wal-Mart, or even have a record deal, for people to discover you.
I’m streaming music every day. If you think about it, it costs $10 or $12 a month, so that’s $120 or more a year. I don’t know when the last time was I spent more than $120 on CDs at Wal-Mart, so I’m spending more on music in that sense. The money’s there, and I guess it needs to figured out how it can be divvied up to the songwriters, but that’s a whole other story.
You’re a big fan of co-writing songs. What do you get out of co-writing that you might not get from writing solo?
It’s funny because a lot of people move to Nashville with only having ever writing songs by themselves, but I was different. I didn’t start writing songs until I was in college, and I wrote with my roommate. I never wrote songs by myself when I started, so when I moved to Nashville, I thought the normal thing to do was find other people to write with. I’ve learned over the years that writing with two or three other people means having two or three other minds you trust in the room. The more brains in the room, the better, in my opinion.
Have you noticed that your song ideas change a lot once you bring them to a group of writers?
Co-writing is really a different thing every day, no day is ever the same. Some days I’ll have an idea that a song needs be written a certain way, but when I sit down with someone else, we write it in a completely different way and it usually ends up being so much better than the idea I originally had for that song. It can be totally random like that a lot and that’s one of the reasons I like the co-writing process so much.
“Some Girls,” Rodgers’ first single to country radio, is out now.
