By Rich Monetti****Jamie Burke was born in Austin, Texas and moved when her dad took his DJ career to Denver, Colorado. As a result, the country/rock/pop singer spent a lot of time going backstage and meeting the stars as a kid. Eventually, she picked up her own guitar and set out for Nashville, making a pretty good beginning. After ten years of performing at the same venues got boring, Burke took her strings to New York City. Her introduction to the Big Apple last January, though, had her second-guessing the decision—dropped off in front of her new apartment on a dreary, wet, cold evening, she felt pretty compromised among all her possessions.
Not quite ready to throw up her hands—yet she was rethinking even that notion—when a couple suddenly approached. “Are you going to rob me?” Burke fearfully thought. To the contrary, the lending hand and good will the couple offered has turned out to be commonplace to her. This welcoming wasn’t the only surprising thing Burke found in making a home here in New York “I turn around and every single person is watching and listening,” she remembers, coming out for her first performance. By contrast, in her experience, Nashville audiences are too often attached to and involved with their phones.
Aside from the acceptance country music has gotten at her shows, it was culture shock for Burke to witness how much New Yorkers appreciate art. Still, she was pretty nervous about her beginnings as a performer in New York. “I was shaking on the subway, because I thought this was my last shot,” Burke reveals.
But long before reaching this precipice, Burke had come a long way. She taught herself guitar, sang in church choirs and took in a steady diet of listening to music. “I love 90s country, soft, pop rock of the 70s and hard rock from the 80s,” she says. A defining moment came when her father booked Reba McEntire for a benefit concert. “Reba did this epic costume change during the show,” Burke recalls. “The lights went out and she was in a completely different outfit when they came back on a minute later. So I was like—I want to do this some day!”
It wasn’t only elaborate dreams for Burke, though. She did her homework and went to college to study English and Music Business. But she came to a realization over time. “I was learning more on a bar stool than I was learning in the classroom,” she jokes. In other words, the singer had a pretty good business sense from her father—and playing live makes the best teacher in her estimation. “You got to get thrown in there,” she says adamantly.
As for her writing process, the guitar helps her throw down. “Sometimes I’ll have lyrics and then I pick around until I find something,” she says. “Or sometimes there’s a full-on melody and I need to figure out what key is missing.” Country music appeals to her because the stanzas go beyond just expressing basic feelings and emotions. “I’m a storyteller,” Burke adds. By way of example, she tells about an incident one night outside a restaurant. Some guy clad in a leather jacket was dragging away on a cigarette and the girls were checking him out big time. This phenomenon had her wondering: why do girls always go for the bad boys? “As soon as I said that, I was like, oh, that’s a song,” she says.
Bad boy personally does not apply in her case, and musically, she’s made the most of the good guy in her life. “It’s crazy that in the moment you give up on love and you’re not looking or trying, you meet someone who knocks your socks off,” she smiles. Thus, Unexpected is the resulting EP of her experience, and will soon be joined in release by Reckless and Relentless, a culmination of older songs with a few news ones. She’s also signed with the Oregano label.
For Burke, who has appeared at locales such as the Bitter End, Pine Box Rock Shop and Silvana to name a very few throughout the Northeast, her current situation is just fine with her career aspirations. “I used to want fame and fortune—the record deal and all. But the more that I’ve done music, the more I realize I just want to do it full time and not have to pick up any side gigs,” she says.
To find out more about where Jamie Burke will be appearing, go to https://www.facebook.com/jamieburkemusic/
great article! xox