Today we’d like to introduce you to J.P. Burr.
Hi J.P., it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
My name is J.P. Burr. I’m an independent singer/songwriter and guitarist living in Nashville, Tennessee. I grew up in Burns, Tennessee, a little town about 45 minutes west of Nashville. I don’t come from a family of musicians (exluding my late grandfather), like many famous artists do. However, I come from a family with a deep love and appreciation for good music and how it moves people. From my earliest memories, I can recall good music being played at every gathering, in the car, or just around the house while we were home. The fact that I was able to witness and feel the power of meaningful music made me want to sing and play an instrument. When I was very young, maybe first grade, I started taking vocal lessons. My mom always sang in the car and around the house, and would often harmonize with the radio and CDs, so I learned how find the right notes and harmonize as well.
After a few years of vocal lessons, and some piano lessons that I wasn’t crazy about, my uncle brought a Playstation over to my house with a game called Guitar Hero 2 on it. I failed the first song, but upon trying it again, something clicked in my brain with the frets, colors, and rhythms. This led to a Guitar Hero obsession, which turned into a guitar and rock n’ roll obsession. My grandfather was a guitar player and collector for most of his life, and he began teaching me about chords, progressions, and the different kinds of pickups and pedals. We would often jam together when I went to see my grandparents. From then on, all I wanted to do was play guitar and find new music to listen to. I would hyperfixate on a new artist nearly every week. Metallica, Eric Clapton, Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Audioslave, Tom Petty, and the list goes on. While my classmates were listening to whatever was popular at the time, I was buried in classic rock and blues. Oddly enough, country music is the genre that I grew up on the least.
My parents recognized that I had passion and drive for music, so they did everything that they could to further my passion. My dad would take me to play open mic nights in Nashville, and they signed me up for music camps in the summer. The music camps were great because I got experience playing in bands with other musicians at an early age. Going to these camps made me feel relatively normal for dreaming about being a rockstar, because the other kids l did too. I still work with many of the friends I made at these camps, since they’re now professionals in the industry too. I started writing songs because I felt like I had things to say, although I didn’t always know what at that age.
In high school, I started gigging around the local music scene with other artists my age. The amount of talent in the group that I came up with during those years still blows my mind. Everyone made such different music, and it was all incredible. With everyone being very good at what they did, it motivated me to want to improve constantly. I’m not afraid to say that I’m just as influenced by some of my peers as I am my heroes.
When I started college in 2017, I really began honing in on my songwriting. I got on a bit of an alt-country kick, discovering the genius of artists like Jason Isbell and Chris Stapleton. There’s a big difference in what appeals to musicians, and what appeals to non-music players and/or songwriters. I grew tired of playing music for musicians, and came back around to simple songs that effectively tell stories. Writers like Lyle Lovett, Tom Petty, and Bruce Springsteen come to mind. Halfway through my freshman year, I received an opportunity to go on the road playing guitar for an up-and-coming country artist. I dropped out of college and went from playing small local concerts to opening up for Luke Combs, Dwight Yoakam, and Brantley Gilbert. This was a huge change of pace for me, and the first taste of doing what I had always wanted. For a while, I thought maybe I was supposed to just be a guitarist, so I stopped prioritizing my writing. After about 8 months, things weren’t really working out with the gig, so I stepped back from touring to get back in touch with my personal goals.
Afterwards, I received another touring opportunity, and have continued playing guitar for countless artists over the years. Music has taken me all over the country, and more recently all over the world. I actually just got back from Seljord, Norway with an artist. We played a country music festival over there last weekend.
My journey to finding my sound and writing style has been long, but I’m glad it’s taken me all this time. Overall, I strive to be an artist as versatile as Tom Petty. What inspires me about him is that he put himself in a big enough box to where he could stretch into different genres while always still sounding like him. His music appeals to fans of rock, country, folk, and blues. Those are my favorite genres, and I want to give myself room to stretch into each of them. Originally, I never set out to be a country artist, but my time in Nashville playing primarily with great country artists has really rubbed off on my approach. I don’t always love a lot of modern country music, but not to say that there isn’t great stuff out there. I think a lot of it just sounds too sterile and over-computerized. The sound of autotune has become normal to so many people, to the point where many can’t tell when it’s being used nowadays. In many cases, it’s like nails on a chalkboard to me. If you listen to Tom Petty’s best records, they just sound so natural, and so human. They weren’t trying to make every layer as loud as humanly possible. Everything seems so compressed nowadays, and I’m not sure how we got to that from having such beautiful-sounding records. I don’t want to chase trends. Trends will come and go forever. My goal is to make classic-sounding music that will stand the test of time. One of my favorite slogans comes from Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound record label – “Good sound comes back around”, and I think that’s true.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
No, not at all. Until very recently, I always felt clueless on how to get things off the ground. In today’s industry, there is immense pressure for independent artists to already be moving at 60 miles per hour. The modern industry prioritizes social media numbers over just about anything, including art or potential. At the end of the day, it’s a business, and you have to prove to people that you can make them money.
Playing music for a living has been my dream since I was very young, but as I got older, that dream became much more specific and more complicated. After making the decision to drop out of college due to a touring opportunity, I figured my plan would be: 1. Write songs like crazy 2. Record an awesome album 3. Play shows and develop a following through live performance. As many of you readers may know, life doesn’t really work that way. I was struggling to know what to focus on for a long time. I knew I wanted to play music, but I started getting confused about what that would really look like. For years, I was primarily a hired guitarist. I loved doing it, but after a while, you start to crave being musically creative. I was just replicating parts, all the time, that had been written and played by other guitarists. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, but I’ve always felt called to create original art. I started writing again in the midst of playing for other artists. It gets depressing because for years and years, no one really cares if you aren’t going for your dreams. You have to be the one to keep yourself going, and that can be incredibly difficult and lonely. I’m incredibly blessed to have such supportive family members and friends to help pull me out of the trenches. Over the years, I’ve just kept my head down and tried to take advantage of every opportunity that came my way. I eventually reached a point where I no longer had to work a side job. For the last three or four years, I have been making a living purely from playing music, so I already feel like I’ve made it in some ways.
The struggles that I face now are figuring out how to reach people with my music whilst having no team or label behind me. I spent some time working with a social media coach recently. He helped me acquire the right mindset to tackle social media in an effective way that didn’t feel soul-sucking. I now realize the power of social media. Within the last month, my new approach has allowed me to reach more people via the internet than I have ever reached at any point in my career. For years, I felt that even if I somehow made the greatest album that had ever been made, it wouldn’t matter because I couldn’t get it to enough people. Changing this thought process was one of the most important things I have ever done. I’m finally starting to see some light at the end of this tunnel.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I specialize in songwriting, singing, and guitar playing. I feel like I’m known for different things to different people, but I’m more committed to my artistry now than ever, and it’s definitely my top priority and end goal. Right now, the priority order is: 1. artistry 2. songwriting 3. guitar playing.
I am most proud of the songs that I have written over the last two years, and the recordings that I have of them. I’ve been co-writing with some incredibly talented writers who I’m lucky to be friends with.
I’ve never really been concerned with what’s popular in music because it’s constantly changing. “Most popular” usually doesn’t equal “best”. The most popular food in the world is McDonald’s, but it’s definitely not the best. I generally prefer older music to newer music anyway, and I always want my recordings to reflect that. One of the upsides to being an independent artist is that I have no one to appease but me. All of my recordings, released or soon-to-be, are exactly how I want them to be. I’m more proud of my upcoming album “No Man’s Land” than anything I have worked on, and I can’t wait to share it.
I think what sets me apart from others is my creative process, and the fact that I’m not afraid of people not liking my music. No band or artist, in history, has ever been loved by everybody. There are people who think the Beatles are terrible, while they’re regarded as the most important band of all time. In a genre [country music] often associated with lacking originality, I’m not afraid to lean into my strengths and be different. A lot of people say that country music all sounds the same. Here’s why: It’s often times all the same musicians, in the same studios, with the same producers, mixed and mastered by the same people, and released on the same few record labels in. Nashville. It all sounds so similar because it’s all made the same way by the same groups of people. When I go into the studio, I try to make sure things don’t sound too “corporate”. There is a fine line that I’m trying to walk between something retro and organic-sounding, and something modern enough. I’m lucky enough to be close friends with some incredible musicians, and even luckier to have them play on my recordings. My band is a massive part of my sound. They’ve really helped me cultivate a sound that I’m proud of. I bring the band into the studio, with some Nashville number charts that I’ve written for the songs, and we play them down like all the great bands used to, tweaking them until they feel right.
What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
I think we’ll see a shift away from hyper-polished and computer-perfected music. I’m already seeing it with the popularity of Zach Bryan. His first releases were essentially iPhone work tapes, and they were massively successful. He and his team have intentionally kept his newer albums raw and imperfect, and that’s reassuring. I was firstly comforted by the popularity of Chris Stapleton. The fact that he can make retro and organic-sounding music at the scale at which he’s doing it is awesome, and it gives me hope for my style. Red Clay Strays are another great example of this.
I also think, and hope, that we’ll see some AI regulation. It’s still very new to the industry, so it’s hard to know the extent of the threat that it poses. I’m not against all uses of AI in music, but taking credit for the work of a computer doesn’t sit well with me. Music is already one of the most innately human things, and to strip away the humanity from the creation of it completely turns me off. It’s all about intention for me. I don’t use Suno, and I have no plans of ever doing so. I’m just not interested in listening to songs “written” or produced by computer software.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://jpburr.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jp.burr/?hl=en
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jpburrmusic
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@JPBurr
- Other: https://linktr.ee/jp.burr
