Family man, Jason Scot, is determined to do what it takes to reach his goal. “I’ve done everything from janitorial work to installing alarms. I’ve done a lot of oddball jobs in between in order to get to where I am now and to be able to support my music career. It’s just what we have to do until things pan out.” To attain that purpose, he lives two lives, one as a construction supervisor on one side of the country, the other as a country music singer. “I live in Nashville and I fly back and forth to California. I spend one week in California and one week in Nashville. I have been a supervisor for a construction company in California for the past fifteen years.”

Dedication like that has to come with a serious support system, much of that comes to Jason via his wife, Amy. “It’s something internal that you can’t fight. I’ve tried putting it down, I’ve tried to quit playing and live a normal life working 9 to 5 and it just wasn’t for me. My wife can tell you I was a wreck when I quit. I pursued it and she’s been a good inspiration to me. She’s the one that keeps me going. If I feel like I want to quit. She says, ‘You’ve got to keep going, it’s what you love to do.’ It is what I love to do. Until it’s fulfilled, I just don’t want to quit.”

When Jason was a child, his family moved around a bit, but they spent the bulk of his adolescence in Palmdale/Lancaster in Southern California about an hour north of LA. “Where I grew up, it was a very rural area. In my younger years, I came from more of an LA based area where you’d have a school with three thousand kids and I moved to an area where there were literally like two hundred kids in the school. So, there wasn’t much to do out there. That’s kind of why I picked up a guitar. It was get yourself into trouble, or do something creative.”

“I started when I was about 15 years old. I started playing the guitar. My sister had a guitar when we were kids and she never played it. She got it for Christmas or something. I started messing around with it. I had some friends that actually played so I just watched and learned. I play a little of every instrument. If you’re raised in a church, you’re raised around people who can sing. So, when I sang in the church, I learned from them. I started writing songs at a young age, too. Every year after that, my love for music just kept escalating.”

Jason grew up attending a little church in Littlerock, California, “It was very small; it had maybe thirty people in it,” he says. “The preacher's wife would play the guitar and they would sing duos. By watching her play the guitar, that’s what also led me to play, too. Before I knew it, I became the entertainment at the church. They were my first audience. Some of my fondest memories were in the church. My parents, my sisters, everybody sang because of the church, but no one ever took it any further, except me. They support me and always have.”

Jason grew up the only boy in the family, among three sisters. “One good thing about having sisters was that once I got to my teen years, they had lots of friends. That was cool. I was the second oldest. I had my friends and did my thing, luckily for my sisters, they had each other to grow up with. Maybe that’s why I have long hair, it stuck with me,” he says with a laugh. “We are a close-knit family. I often wonder if that’s why I pursued music, maybe I was striving for attention. I was more of the well-balanced one; my sisters were kind of wild. I think by watching them it made me want to tame down at a young age. Music kept me on track. I look back now and think that if I didn’t have music, I don’t know where I’d be.”

“By the time I was sixteen, I had formed my first band. By the time I was seventeen, we were playing in bars. A lot of times we never got questioned on our age. We just played where we could, whether it was a VFW club or a bar or someone’s backyard, we’d do it.”

“A few years later, I met up with some guys and formed a group called Smalltown. I always listened to country. I followed country music; I started focusing more on the writing part of country music and it led me here. I liked the storylines that these songs told. Smalltown was a vocal group and we had three lead singers. It was kind of like the Eagles. We were moving up the ranks pretty quickly, but we had a falling out and ended up separating. I have nothing against the guys, they were a great talent. We had a good run.”

“One of the guys from that group, Mace McAdams and I started a group called Mason County and we did that for about a year until I moved to Nashville, hoping he’d make the move as well. But, he wasn't able to. So I ended up doing a solo thing.”

“I love country music because of the lyrics and the people. Country fans are down-to-earth and super loyal and that makes it a whole lot nicer. I’m probably a little more edgy than your average country. That’s an area I hope people will accept. In country, either people will get you or they won’t, and if you aren’t traditional, they get kind of skeptical. I’m definitely not traditional. But, I hope I bring enough to the table where people will be interested.”

Performing can be a learning curve as Jason found out early in his career, “One of the bars I played at was called the Player’s Club. It was in this remote part of the desert near where I was raised. I was doing a show and some guy wanted to come up and play spoons. I never had heard anyone play the spoons. I was trying to be a nice guy and said, ‘Yeah, come on up.’ He came up and he would not leave, so he played through the whole set cause I didn’t have the heart to tell him to stop. He came back with his spoons every night that we played there.” He adds, laughing, “I learned a lesson; you’ve got to be kinda careful when you tell people to come up onstage.”

Jason will have a booth at the CMA Festival this month in Nashville and will give a performance at the Hard Rock Café during the week. Jason is also in the studio with producer Cliff Downs working to get his first CD out soon. His goal is to make music that stays with his fans. “There are certain songs that people can relate to that will take them back in time. Music takes you to a place that you’ll remember for life.”