Jake Wesley Rogers

Artist Information

Jake Wesley Rogers remembers the moment the aura fell into place for his debut album. It was April 2022, and he’d been finding inspiration while writing on a trip to Buenos Aries, when all of a sudden, doodling and sketching a story while listening to the radio in his Airbnb, a mantra came to him: the biggest mistake a person makes is to see themselves as the world sees them. “That was the oath I made to myself from that day, to go on this journey and to see how deeply the truth can resonate with me and see if I'm brave enough to say it,” Jake says.

What followed was a nearly three-year long process of writing, recording, producing and fine-tuning every aspect of his debut album, In The Key Of Love. It’s a record that comforts, excites, and surprises, building upon the legacy Jake has created over the past nine years as one of music’s most exciting singers, songwriters, and performers. “Without exception, every single one of these songs is one that pushed me into the new,” Jake says. “I made a very conscious choice to honor what I've put out before, but also to step into this album as completely new songs. This album saved my life in so many ways and is still actually teaching me more than most things I've learned about myself. It really took me on a journey of my whole life.”

In The Key Of Love tells an unconventional love story in many parts. “When I was young, I ran away from unconditional love in order to find it in things that would only love me conditionally, whether that was a person or a substance or an audience,” Jake says. “This album is about the balance of love and fear, and interplay of those two concepts. I've found that it's actually not about letting go of the fear. It's about letting the love in. In making this music, I opened myself up to deeper truths than I have before, and I'm still learning from them. For the first time, I feel like I'm on my path.”

One key to In The Key Of Love, in Jake’s telling, turned out to be a producer: Mike Sabath. They first crossed paths when Jake brought him the bones of “My Misery,” a song he’d started writing in Buenos Aires—the bridge of which contains, in his estimation, some of the album’s most important songwriting: “I saw my abuser in a dream / I somehow felt some empathy / I realized the pain that he's in would always be worse than me and my misery.” As Jake tells it, “That was like a real dream I had where I was sitting face to face with him, and I saw that he would actually never be okay. And then I kind of felt like, ‘Oh, actually, I think I will be okay.’ That's one of the functions of this album for me: not just overcoming, not being a survivor, but making sense of what's actually going on in those, in dynamics of abuse and dynamics of fear. It's a place that I never actually expected to get to.”

After the “My Misery” sessions, Jake and Mike found their way back to each other for a weekend of hiking and songwriting at a Santa Ynez house formerly owned by Elton hitmaker Bernie Taupin, who had left his piano behind at the estate. Cosmically, magically, clandestinely, hours and hours after they’d been locked out of the house by mistake—staring at the piano through the windows—Jake jiggled the door handle one last time and it swung open. The pair entered, Jake sat at the piano and started playing and singing what would become the album’s title track; within minutes, he told Mike he needed him to produce the entire album, which Mike immediately agreed to do. By midnight, sound engineers had driven equipment from Malibu up to the house; by 9am, the album’s title track “In The Key Of Love” was recorded.

After that, once a month, Jake and Mike would link for 48 hours at a time to let the creative energy take hold of them, their new creative partnership yielding songs that favored honesty, pain, vulnerability, gratitude, forgiveness, and so many more of life’s rawest emotions. The pair would find each other in cities all over the world, like the time at London’s Abbey Road Studios while Jake was in town. Knowing that they were close to cracking the code on a key album track, “Loser”—the last to get written—Mike flew in from vacation in Europe to help. It was June 1, at midnight, the exact moment the studio closed, by the time they wrapped; it was that moment that Jake flashed back to six months prior when he’d gotten a vision of the words “June 1” flashing through him. “I never could have planned for any of this to happen,” Jake says, “but I just know that it all happened exactly the way it was meant to.”

In The Key Of Love finds roots in Jake’s past while walking confidently into his future, mixing bold storytelling with powerful singing and musicianship that once again announces Jake Wesley Rogers as one of the most exciting artists of his generation. At moments, it’s grand and sweeping (“In The Beginning” and “Hot Gospel,” the latter of which Jake grinningly calls his “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”), full of purpose and power; in others, the camera zooms in to a much smaller scale (the raw “Tired Of Living” and the confessional storytelling of “Kitchen Table”).

“Mother, Mary, and Me,” written years prior and deemed too special not to save for his debut album, features piano and vocals from his original demo take in 2019 “from my little apartment on Music Row in Nashville”—an emotional homage to his roots that shows the depth of his lyricism from the very beginning. “God Bless,” which Jake calls “a Beatitudes for the modern age,” tackles contradictions on a chorus so sticky and splendid that you’ll be singing it back to yourself for days after hearing it.

Throughout its 11 songs, In The Key Of Love welcomes all. Because, as Jake says, “when you sing in the key of love, you're not denying the pain or the fear. You're just knowing that it's all held in a higher place.”