Jake Wesley Rogers Is Pop’s Latest Queer Gem

metroweekly.com:

LOVE, will grace the event’s Meadow Stage on Saturday afternoon.Rogers joins a lineup of queer artists and allies that also includes the band Lucius, Brandy Clark, Yola, Celisse, local faves Oh He Dead, and one of Rogers’ early artistic heroes, Rufus Wainwright.“Rufus is someone I found in college,” Rogers recalls. “That kind of blew my whole world up as far as this incredibly prolific singer-songwriter, writing these songs as an openly gay person in the late ’90s, early 2000s.

That is so important and so inspiring to me.”Rogers, who learned piano while still a kid in Ozark, Missouri, had taken to writing his own songs as a necessary means of self-expression and preservation. “I started to write songs at about the age of 12, which is when I was sort of forced out of the closet, and was feeling very dark and scared,” he says.“It’s that energy that led me to the piano, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

I think I went to it as a form of catharsis and finding a way to find autonomy within my story, and make something that was whole outside of something where I felt relatively broken.

And it’s still that, when I sit down I just want to make something that feels like medicine to me, that is it. And my medicine is not anybody else’s medicine.”But his hope is that his audience can find themselves in his medicine, the same way he found catharsis through his heroes’ music. “When I listen to a record like ‘By the Way, I Forgive You’ by Brandi Carlile, I could tell she wrote that because she needed it,” he says.“She needed to vindicate her younger self who was traumatized in a religious setting.