by Jane Roser
(photo by Bailey Shugart)
“Apparently April is “Drive back and forth to play shows in Florida month.” Nashville-based Indie/Folk artist, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Jordan Eastman posted that on his Facebook page recently and considering he has 253 shows booked (so far) this year, that’s just the tip of the ‘berg.
“Last night, I was with a friend and he said ‘can you stop texting!’ I said ‘I’m not texting, I’m booking shows’. It started on a whim, really,” Eastman recalls. “I wondered if I could book a month solid of shows. I took some time off work and booked 31 shows. You just send out 500 emails and you’re guaranteed a response back from some of them. I’ve started going back to the same venues and circling around.”
Eastman’s talent for music (he can play over 20 instruments. Let me repeat that…20!) is in his genes; his mom is a pianist and Eastman began writing songs and playing piano at the age of five after his mom insisted that he learn an instrument. “I hated it,” he says, “but, I think it’s because it was forced on me and I had to practice every day. I finally told my mom I didn’t want to play music, but if I had to play something, then I wanted to play guitar. She said ‘well, grandma’s got a bass, so if you play bass for a year and decide you don’t love it, then you can stop [playing music]. I played that bass so much, I wouldn’t stop. I just never thought I’d ever do this as a job.”
Leaving his home in Florida to move to Nashville was a life-changing and rather abrupt decision. “2010 was a whole Murphy’s law kind of year-everything bad that could happen did happen, so in 2011, I told my dad ‘I think I’m going to go to Nashville tomorrow’. He said ‘what? Where are you going to live? I said in my truck and I showed him this drawing of where everything was going to fit in my truck. So I moved to Nashville and basically live in my truck and travel around and I love it. I love every day of it. Nashville is probably my favorite city. I love that you can walk into a bar or a restaurant and the guy making your hamburger wrote songs for Tim McGraw or is the frontman for this awesome blues band. It’s just really cool that the level of talent here is so high that some of the people here doing the normal grunt work are in the best bands in the country. I absolutely love that. It takes away the whole ‘wow’ factor and brings it down to writing good songs. Everybody’s on the same page and everybody is equal and I think that’s the way music should be.”
Eastman is the personification of the Johnny Cash song “I’ve Been Everywhere” and you can probably find him at some point from Tennessee to Chicopee, Spirit Lake, Grand Lake, Devils Lake, Crater Lake, for Pete’s sake, including The Barbary in Philadelphia this past February. “Philly is completely different than anywhere else in the North East and that’s what I like about it. Philly and also Manhattan are two places that just really seem to grasp music and enjoy it for what it is. They enjoy the songwriting and the depth of the music.”
Eastman also runs into his share of unexpected fans in the oddest places. “Somewhere between Asheville and Staunton-I have no idea where-I stopped at this store at 5am, I hadn’t slept for days, so I was a bit out of it. I walked in and was staring at the clerk’s shirt; it took me a second to realize that this guy is wearing my merch. He didn’t recognize me, but we started talking and I said, ‘that’s a funny shirt’. He said, ‘yeah, I saw this guy play in Tennessee. You should buy his record, I have a copy in my car.’ And this guy starts talking about me to me! I never told him who I was, but I died laughing.”
There was another time that Eastman walked into the acoustic room at a Guitar Center and started unconsciously singing along to a song that a kid in there was playing before he realized, wait a minute…that’s my song. When he asked about the tune he was playing, the kid answered he had seen the song’s writer perform at The Basement in Nashville; he couldn’t remember his name, but he bought the album.
The first single off his latest album 1924, “Hold To Your Anchors”, was released as a music video and accrued over 35,000 YouTube views and several thousand downloads within the first week of it’s release. Eastman’s song “Aweigh, My Weight! Away!” has also been getting a lot of attention, winning a songwriting magazine’s ReverbNation contest (out of over 5000 entries).
“That song should have never been on the album,” recalls Eastman. “The album was done and I had already sent it off to get mastered. I had vaguely written this song and tried to record it in the studio, but it just didn’t work out. Later, I was sitting in my truck playing guitar and I decided I just had to record that song; so I finished it up, called my friend, whose house we had built a recording studio in, and we recorded the entire song late that night. I played all the tracks on it and recorded a bunch of weird things, too, like the air conditioner turning on. We mixed it that night and the next morning I dropped it off to my friend who was mastering the album and it’s one of my favorite songs on there.”
Eastman is currently touring Florida and has a bunch of festival dates coming up before gearing up to spend several days this Spring knocking out new songs. He’s hoping to include 15 on a new album as well as releasing a few singles. “The goal is to have another music video done and a whole album tracked by the end of May, so that when I’m gone over the summer, a lot of the post production can be wrapped up and mastered,” says Eastman.
Before we finish our conversation, I ask Eastman about a post he wrote almost two years ago that, being a fan of 80’s music and owning a ’45 of “Say You, Say Me” intrigued me. Eastman mentioned that Lionel Richie gave him $2 when he was busking on the streets of St. Louis and I had to know if this really happened or if it was a guy who looked like Lionel, which is rare, but not inevitable. Eastman laughs, “this guy walked over and literally sat down in front of me as I was playing. He had an angry looking older man with him and he listened to me play about five songs before saying to me that if I could write a song about what was going on right now, he would give me $2. So I made up this song, that oddly enough I love and play all the time at my shows. When I was done playing, he stood up and handed me $2 and asked me what my name was. I introduced myself and [not recognizing who he was] he laughed and said, ‘people call me Lionel.’ The older man was behind him yelling a bunch of curse words and Lionel turns around and says, ‘you might know Mr. Berry.’ And they walked off. The guy I was with was saying, ‘how could you not recognize Lionel Richie and Chuck Berry?’ It was pretty funny.”
Chances are good that Jordan Eastman will be moseying along to your neck of the woods in the near future and you should definitely catch a show, buy a band tee shirt (or two) and hope to one day run into him while you’re wearing it. Because that’s just good karma, right there.
