Jordan Rowe Leads a New Generation of Georgia Boys Fixin’ to Make Nashville Their Own

It was 11:30pm, and Jordan Rowe’s phone was ringing. The small town kid with the big time dreams and the cramped Nashville apartment assumed whoever was calling must have something important to say.

So he answered it.

And it was Jason Aldean.

“He wanted to see if he could borrow my cable code to watch an (Atlanta) Braves game on his bus,” Rowe chuckles at the memory, going on to further explain the Aldean connection. “One night, Dee Jay Silver used one of my cable logins to watch stuff on the road when he was on the road with Luke Combs and Jason (Aldean) is good friends with Dee Jay Silver, so yeah, that’s how I met Aldean…over the phone.”

He laughs again.

“If I talk too much, let me know,” Rowe sheepishly admits. “I can be like an old Baptist preacher and get mighty long winded, ma’am.”

Indeed, the southern hospitality and the unrelenting enthusiasm that seems to be radiating off of the singer/songwriter right now is totally understandable, as the kid from the small town of Adel, Georgia partners with American Songwriter on Friday (Sept. 25) to premiere the lyric video for his first big country music release titled “Good for Nothin’.”

“My musical influences are over the board, from Luke Bryan and Alan Jackson to more modern stuff like Morgan Wallen and Jon Pardi, and I think you can hear all of that in this song,” explains Rowe while on a break from a writing session at Lee Brice’s farm in September. “It’s got this fun, nineties edge groove with modern phrasing that we tried to marry all into the song.”

Written by Rowe alongside his Nashville roommate Ray Fulcher and Jay Brunswick, the feel good, break-up anthem with the longer than traditional chorus and the inserted adlibs makes this one fresh and relatable, and in the midst of a pandemic, quite needed.

But one might wonder how the heck this fresh-faced boy from Georgia, who continues to get carded even though he sits at 23 years of age, ended up in Nashville hobnobbing with the stars and writing with the legends?

Well, that story isn’t as complicated as you might think.

His musical beginnings start much like so many before him. The only child of a Georgia police officer and a city clerk at City Hall, Rowe sang at church and his high school choir and wrote his first song at 16. And yes, people would constantly tell him he had a God-given talent.

“It sounds weird to be saying that I had a God given talent because I try to be humble about it, but yes ma’am, that’s what they would tell me,” remembers Rowe. “I had always dreamed of somehow making a career out of singing and songwriting, but I had no idea how to make it feasible until I got in college. That’s when I realized it might be attainable.”

Rowe attended the University of Georgia to study agribusiness and agricultural economics, but his passion for music kept tugging at his soul. While adding music business to his studies, Rowe also started doing some acoustic gigs around town and writing songs in his dorm. And one day, he made the decision to spend just one summer in Nashville.

And that’s when he got hooked.

“The first day I got to Nashville that first summer, I was set to live with Ray (Fulcher,)” remembers Rowe, who would end up interning every summer at River House Artists. “My parents had just dropped me and all my stuff off and I called Ray (Fulcher) and he told me that he was at Jonathan Singleton’s studio working on a song and that I should come over and hang. THE Jonathan Singleton. It was incredible.”

After a few more summers, Rowe ended up moving to Nashville permanently in June of 2019 with a diploma and a guitar in his hand and just over a year afterwards, he’s got his first single.

“’Good for Nothin’ has always been the one I wanted to come out of the gate with,” explains Rowe, who says his dad routinely texts him song ideas that he thinks up when he’s ‘riding around on the lawn mower.’ “I think sonically it shows a lot of different sides of me, both the traditional and the modern.”

Despite what some might say was some pretty darn good fortune, Rowe admits it. He has been quite lucky to hook up with a strong Georgia-based contingent in Nashville, a group of ‘guys and gals’ who tend to stick together within what can occasionally be quite a cut throat industry.

“When you stumble across genuine people in a business as complex as the music business, they really stand out,” he explains. “I believe everything happens for a reason and all things work together for the good.”

Amen Jordan Rowe.

Amen.