Above the Law
For George Rowe, music was a higher calling than law school and a career as an attorney.
by Michael Herman | posted 1/05/2004
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Despite a full-ride scholarship and a law degree from prestigious Pepperdine University, George Rowe never fully felt at home filing legal briefs and arguing in courtrooms. His place was at a piano, behind a microphone, making music that changes people's lives.
Tell us about your first album.
George RoweI've been working on it for the last year and a half. It's really a variety of stuff. I have such an eclectic taste in music. I listen to everything from country to classical and from R&B to pop, so you hear that in the music I write.
There are gut-wrenching ballads like "Broken" with just me and a piano and a cello. On another song, there are some really complex, dissonant harmonies that have a Take 6 flavor. Then there are straight-up pop/adult contemporary songs as well.
One thing I struggle with is the question of what style of music I do. I don't feel comfortable being pigeonholed as one style. I don't want to be called this pop-artist or this jazz guy or an R&B or ballad guy. I enjoy a wide variety of music so that's what naturally comes out of me. I want to be true to the styles of music I like and I don't want to do music just to win the favor of one particular crowd.
I hope that means there's something on each of the albums for everyone.
What style of music do you most enjoy doing live?
RoweI would've thought that I'd like the security blanket of being behind a piano singing a ballad and not being too exposed on stage. I don't think of myself as an entertainer dancing around the stage. But I just got off the tour with Michael W. Smith, and he had some pop/rock stuff we were doing and I just got consumed into it. So many people after the shows were saying that I was fun to watch and that I dance more than anyone on stage. It's not a choreographed thing, we were just moving along to the music.
I'm new at this as an artist. This is my first record and I hadn't toured big before I did with Michael, so I'm still developing as an artist. What I've typically done though is just me singing at a piano. Because I haven't had the luxury of the support of a record label up to this point in my career, I haven't had a band with me. So that limits what I can do.
What does your songwriting process look like?
RoweIt really depends on what I'm going for. For a while during the contract negotiation with record labels, my wife and I were kind of freeloading off her sister in Little Rock, Arkansas. We were living there and I was driving back and forth to Nashville meeting with folks at labels. That was a six-hour drive each way so I spent a lot of time with a voice recorder in the car. If a song idea, music, or a melodic or lyric idea came to me, I'd sing it into the recorder. There are times when I sit down with intentions of writing and absolutely nothing comes out. That's a scary feeling when nothing comes out of you.
There are other times when I'm co-writing with somebody and it's a real collaborative process. He might throw out a lyric idea and I throw one back at him and we kind of shape it until we're both pleased with it. It goes the same with the music side of the songs we create that way. Sometimes it's an intentional process and other times it just happens.
What's the story behind your song, "Broken"?
RoweI wrote that at a time when I trying to decide if I should use my law degree and get a job. I've got a wife and three kids, so I asked myself if I could afford to take these risks [by pursuing a music career instead]. But I really felt called to do music. It was almost a crisis of faith. I was so used to putting my faith in myself and making sure I had a steady paycheck, so it was a huge leap of faith to put all that aside and do this.
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