Matt Jenkins

Not long ago, a recent high school basketball star, crazy about country music, was in Nashville with his father. It was six o'clock in the morning and they were sitting in their hotel room, dreaming. The reason they were in town had nothing to do with sports and everything to do with country music. The recent basketball star had grown up singing and playing guitar in the small theaters of the Texas “Opry” circuit and had immersed himself in the country music his father always had written and performed. That morning, they were contemplating listings in the Yellow Pages under the heading “Song Publishers.”

Matt Jenkins -- born in Fort Worth, Texas, raised in Aledo, twenty miles west -- had been tempted to move to Nashville to pursue a music career straight out of high school. “I’d started playing guitar, and dabbling in songwriting, and singing,” he says. “And I was always recording. I was eaten up with it.”

But he held off moving to Tennessee. Instead, Jenkins attended South Plains Junior College, near Lubbock, where he studied guitar, voice, songwriting and theory. After a year he left and returned to Aledo, where eventually Jenkins submitted a three-song demo to a Grammy/NARAS competition. His work shined: His demo made the final cut -- the only country artist chosen -- and later Jenkins was scheduled to perform, competing against the other aspirants. But right now his dad was calling publishers on his behalf.

As it happened, the first call went out to Jody Williams, head of the venerable Jody Williams Publishing. Atypically, at this early hour, Williams himself answers the phone. He listens to Jenkins’ dad pitch his son. What the hell, Williams figures, and agrees to a meeting. In modern day music-business Nashville, with its intricate webs of managers and agents and lawyers and all manner of professional artist reps, this is highly unusual. But in Jenkins’ case, it’s just the beginning.

Jenkins auditions; Williams immediately offers a deal. Then the publisher rings Tony Brown and Tim DuBois, co-presidents of Universal Records South. “This kid,” Williams says, “You’ve got to hear.” The next day, Jenkins heads to their offices. This was the beginning of a couple of meetings that Jenkins, 22, remembers as “kind of crazy,” resulting in “surreal moments where you feel like you’re there but you’re also kind of not.”

First he played for Brown. The song Jenkins chose -- a particular highlight among the ten new country gems on I’m Just A Man, Jenkins’ Universal Records South debut -- was “King Of The Castle.” What Brown heard was Jenkins’ textured, super-alert baritone enacting the richly nuanced comic plight of a bedazzled husband who boasts that he is “the boss around here” when his wife is away -- or, as Jenkins’ character, singing in his underwear, puts it, “out at the mall.” By the time Jenkins’ reached the spectacularly witty line at the song’s midpoint where Jenkins’ character proclaims that he “can’t wait for the time till she pulls that minivan out of the drive,” Brown recognized that here was a singer and songwriter to be reckoned with. Jenkins’ next stop was Tim DuBois’ office.

DuBois had invited the company’s entire staff to come by and listen as well. Jenkins did another song that appears on his debut collection, an imaginatively turned romantic ballad called “Everywhere.” The narrator sings about how “just with the slightest touch,” his connection to his girlfriend can transport him mentally to a vast variety of places; at one point he mentions that he can even “smell it in [her] hair,” this fantastic power she has for him.

After Jenkins finished, jaws dropped in DuBois’ office. Jenkins performed another song. This one was “They Still Live On,” the finale of I’m Just A Man. It wasn’t high comedy, like “King Of The Castle,” or country romance without a hint of cliché, like “Everywhere.” This song, “They Still Live On,” was about how certain kinds of classic country songs, such as those done by the late “ol’ Keith Whitley” and George Jones, as well as songs Jenkins grew up hearing that his father had written and sung, continued to exist through him, through his own singing and songwritiing. Contemplating one of one such deep tune, Jenkins sings that “It’s more than a chorus and a melody.”

After he finished with these songs, DuBois asked his staff to leave. Then he locked his office door. The idea was not to unlock it until Matt Jenkins had agreed to sign to Universal South.

“When you hear me sing,” Jenkins says, “I’m traditional. That’s who I am, how I grew up. But from a songwriting perspective, I’m not a religionist. I love great music, and I appreciate the Jagged Little Pills, the Matchbox Twentys, the Coldplays. Still, I grew up with that country style, just loving fiddles and steel. I feel like country is inside of me.”

“This album is a statement I wanted to make. I love traditional country records. There’s a thing that Alan Jackson does, and I pulled a little of that. There’s a thing that Brad Paisley does, and I pulled a little of that. And there’s a thing that John Mayer does that I love. But my heart lies with what you can get out of the traditional country song.”

I’m Just A Man is a first-rate demonstration of that; it’s an album from an artist who feels that the traditional country song furnishes him with everything he needs to express all he wants to say. “Little Bit Of Love” begins with the line “Looking through the glass at a jewelry store/Wishing they could buy what they can’t afford,” and goes on to probe the wealth lasting relationships can bring; Jenkins says that he wrote the tune thinking about his two sets of grandparents, who have been married 63 and 55 years respectively. He often writes from observation. “A song like ‘King Of The Castle,’” he says, “I wrote right before I left college. I’ve been around enough married men to know how it is.”

Other songs look into the relative virtues of truth and dishonesty (“I’d Rather You Lied”), the perils of having a good time (“This Night Life”), and the drag of being single on, of all holidays, “Valentine’s Day.” Always, to cite the name of another of Jenkins’ best songs, he sort of feels that there’s “More To The Story” than just flashy rhymes and catchy tunes.

“I’m a fan of how Alan’s done it, how George Strait has done it with a great song like ‘Unwound’ -- you can see the ideas, but they’re so expertly written. It’s easy to sit down, write a hook, then write something stupid around it. I don’t know, I just try to write something with some substance.”

I’m Just A Man is the finest new example of that.