In middle school, Jason was focused on football, until, in a twist of fate, he was stung by a horde of bees. “With all the medication I was on, I had this bad allergic reaction, and I had to quit playing while I was on the medication, and I said, ‘Screw it, I’m not going back.’” Jason says, “That Christmas, I begged and begged and begged for my first guitar. That day I opened up that guitar, I was pretty excited. Part of me was a little down about it, though. I was happy to get a guitar, but I wanted an electric guitar and I got this little eighteen fret student acoustic guitar, not the full size acoustic. I was like, ‘Dad, I love this, but how come you didn’t get me an electric?’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m just worried. I don’t want to spend a bunch of money on a guitar and then you not take to it and it just be a waste.’ I said ‘Alright, I’m gonna prove you wrong!’ I played that little guitar until my fingers were sore and blistered, and every ear was sick of hearing me. And here I am. That’s what I’ve done ever since. I wrote my first song about a year later when I was 14.”
To go along with the first song he had written, at fourteen, Jason got his first electric guitar. He continued to write songs and play his music throughout high school. During college, he auditioned at a showcase in Dallas with a song he had written himself, made it into the Top Ten and won several awards.... After that experience, it wasn’t long before he decided to forgo his studies and move to Nashville, Tennessee, to pursue his dream of being a professional singer/songwriter.
“I was the most shy and quiet kid you ever met in your life.” Jason tells me, a surprise, considering his easygoing, friendly presence onstage, “it was just weird how everything happened for me. How I got here to where I am now. All these things, I can look back, it was like a domino effect; it was just boom, boom, boom. And now, once I got the courage up to move to Nashville and the confidence to keep going with it, I don’t know, it kind of got me out of my shell, I guess, and ‘course now you can ask my booking agent, Glen, he’ll say I, most the time, can’t shut up.”
“I look back through the years and I still can’t believe I’m doing this. I was going to go to school and get a degree like everybody else, and maybe, if I had time, try to work on the music stuff and see if I could go somewhere with it, but, just the way things happen I said, you know, there’s no better time than the present, might as well just jump on it, chase the dream and see what happens.”
After making the move to Nashville, he waited on tables at a steakhouse and, in his free time, he began singing demos for many accomplished songwriters, eventually singing for a man named Brett Jones. Brett was instrumental in furthering Jason’s career. Within nine months, Brett helped him sign a writing contract with Warner Chappell, where Jason has been writing for the past five years.
“I’ve always had an interest in writing; it’s a nice outlet for me to say things on my mind that I can’t really say. I’m trying to write as much as I can. Between the label and the publisher and me, we keep my writing schedule just completely booked up. When I’m not out on the road playing, which is every weekend, sometimes, weeklong gigs, I’m in town writing. They’ve got me doing, like, one a day and then the only way I get to finish stuff for people is to do an afternoon write. So I’m writing twice a day a lot here lately. It’s good though, ‘cause I’m kind of a marathon writer. I’ll go all day until I finally just burn out around 5 or 6 o’clock.”
Subtly placed on the inside of Jason’s forearm is a tattoo that holds special meaning to him, “Everybody always asks me what my tattoo means and I always tell them it means never give up, to me that what it means, but it’s ancient Chinese - literally it translates to one word, Rage. It’s not like angry rage, though, there’s a line from a poem that I saw when I was 13 or 14 years old at the end of a Tim McGraw video. It stuck with me, and when I was in college I actually found the poem in my humanities course. I had been wanting to get a tattoo, but I wanted to get something that meant something to me. And then, it finally occurred to me, the line of that poem is ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light’ and to me that says never give up.. That’s me, like a bulldog, I’m stubborn!”
| written by Krystina Rene' Miller
