“Hello. Jake Owen? This is Jake Owen.”
If we had time-machine smart phones, that’s a phone call I’d like to hear, especially if he happened to be giving advice to his younger self.
Grammy.com posed the question when he was in Los Angeles for a recent concert at the Greek Theater.
“If I could just pick up the phone and call back to 10 years ago — as the guy I am now and talk to the guy that wants to be where I am now — I would probably just tell him that it’s everything you could dream of and more,” Owen said he’d tell his 23-year-old self. “But it’s also a business. It’s knowing how to run a business. It’s knowing how to maintain relationships. It’s knowing how to be a leader.”
It’s only been eight years since Owen released his debut album Startin’ With Me. And before that, he did some time at the Riverside Café in Vero Beach, Florida.
“When you’re a kid on a barstool, it’s just you and your guitar and your speakers that you plug in,” Owen said of those early gigs.
But now?
“It’s a little bit more than a fish sandwich and 50 bucks,” he admitted.
In the interview, Owen also reveals why songs like his current single, “What We Ain’t Got,” are important to him and listeners alike.
“I can’t hang my hat on songs like (‘Beachin”) that I would call ditties,” he said. “But I can hang my hat on a song like ‘What We Ain’t Got.’ Because it literally makes people think about their own life in a way that ‘Beachin” never would. ‘What We Ain’t Got’ will make a guy go home and hug his wife and tell her he loves her. We all, as artists, have to have songs that take us a step further.”