Jake Owen
Vote for Jake on the 2008 CMT Music Awards!
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LOCATION
Nashville, TN
GENRE
Country
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Jake Owen
When Jake Owen finally made his first visit to Music Row, it wasn’t to a record label, or a publisher, or a management office. It was to open a bank account, a deposit that ultimately reaped immeasurable interest and dividends.
“When Becky (the bank employee) asked me what I did for a living, I told her I was a singer/songwriter. She said she would like to hear my music sometime; luckily, I just happened to have a CD,” he says with a laugh. The following day, he got a phone call from Warner-Chappell Music, expressing interest in his material. Though that arrangement did not ultimately work out, Owen felt that his decision to pursue a career in Nashville has been validated. A chance meeting over lunch with producer Jimmy Ritchey (Clay Walker, Mark Chesnutt) confirmed it. “We just hit it off right away,” he says. “We became friends first. But he was very supportive. For the next 18 months, we basically hung out, writing songs. I hardly even went out of my apartment. I wrote a song with Jimmy and Chuck Jones called Ghost that we thought Kenny Chesney was going to record. He didn’t, but that sort of put me on the RCA radar. Jimmy got me together with Renee Bell, Senior Vice President for SonyBMG Nashville and she signed me.”
Less than two years after moving to Nashville, the 24-year-old former golfer had a recording deal and basically brought a finished album to the table.
Owen had already earned the respect of an artist whose opinion he held in high regard. “Soon after I signed to RCA, we flew to Chicago to see Kenny Chesney. We went on his bus after the show and when Renee introduced us, she says, ‘Jake is the guy who co-wrote Ghost.’ He starts singing it back to me, word for word! I couldn’t believe it. He told me he loved the song, and wanted to record it, but it just didn’t work out. It blew my mind. Two years ago, I was that kid in the nosebleed section of the Leon County Civic Center in Tallahassee, watching him run back and forth on stage, a million miles away. I wondered what that would feel like. And there I was, sitting on his bus, one foot away from him, listening to him sing my song back at me.”
Ghost did make it on to Startin’ With Me, Owen’s debut album, which---as the young artist points out—is entirely composed of songs he wrote or co-wrote.
“When I look at my life, where I am right now, I know how improbable it is. I am totally aware of that. I haven’t been doing it and dreaming about it since I was five years old, it doesn’t run in my family, I didn’t grow up singing in church, I didn’t spend 10 years in honky-tonks. But I have always worked hard at whatever I have done, whether it was golf or writing songs or playing at Potbelly’s in Tallahassee. I feel like things happen for a reason, and we are each here for a reason. Maybe the accident that ended my golfing career happened because I was supposed to do this. How many people would my golf game have affected? I hope that my music and my songs can touch people, like I have been touched by other artists’ songs. Is that something that you measure by years or dues? I think it’s something from the heart, and who can measure that?”
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