Biography
A rainy day in April, 2003. 29-year-old singer, songwriter, storyteller, actor and popcultural polymath Jason Downs wakes up and realises things have to change. Everything has to change. The previous twelve months have been among the worst of his life; he knows that the next twelve months must be among the most rewarding. "I had to clean-house my life," he says one year later. "In my personal life I had been non-committal, my professional life was infuriating and unnerving. For years I'd avoided any sort of grown up decision. That was the day I started everything again."
The results are all there here on Jason's second album, 'The Spin'. Fans of its predecessor, 2001's enchanting, genre-defying debut 'White Boy With A Feather', will fall once again for Jason's unique modern-day storytelling flair. Still in place is an outlook both universal and achingly personal, tragic while being heart-warmingly funny, but while Jason remains unchallenged in his subtle blend of hip-hop, country and there's a new spin to 'Spin'. New and old fans alike will relish the delicious forays into electronica and a blossoming narrative style. Songs of innocence are now songs of experience. At the age of 30, Jason Downs is right where he wants to be, and you'll want to be there too.
Jason was born in Maryland, USA. He's part-Cherokee - Jason's great-great-grandmothers were among those who were driven from their lands in the 19th century and went on to settle down with white farmers ? and admits that he blundered through his teenage years with "a combination of innocence and ignorance; full of myself but also full of life. I was both na?ve and arrogant". During his Bible belt upbringing ("na?ve and arrogant in itself," he laughs) he fell for the performing arts. It turned into a love affair and a fantasy, he says today. "The only thing was, my parents were so supportive that I didn't have a reason to wake up from the fantasy." Not until a slightly older Jason moved to New York, that is. "I went out into the world and got my ass kicked in a major way."
After the precise variety of chance encounter people move to New York to engineer (working as a janitor in an apartment block Jason got talking to a florist, who'd been booked for a party, which was being thrown by Lauryn Hill's manager), Jason was put in touch with seminal hip-hop stalwart Milk D, whose Audio 2 hit 'Top Billin'' had soundtracked much of Jason's adolescence ? his old high school team used it during warmups. Gradually, slowly, things began to take shape; management fell into place and finally, and in 2000 he signed to Jive. Then things began to move quickly. By 2001 Jason was in the UK promoting his debut single ? the wonderfully evocative 'White Boy With A Feather', an autobiographical look at Jason's first days in New York. The Face quickly dubbed Jason "your actual 21st Century popstar" and ES Magazine billed him as "a commentator on modern America up there with Lou Reed, Paul Simon and Paul Auster".
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