about jeffrey pepper rodgers

Welcome to my online home for lovers of words and music.

I’m a musician, writer, and editor. I’ve done way too many things over the years in publishing and the music business: I’ve written songs since I was a teenager, played with the band Heavy Wood in the San Francisco area, and made three solo records. In 2008 my song "Fly" won a grand prize in the John Lennon Songwriting Contest. I was the founding editor of Acoustic Guitar magazine and have interviewed a very long list of great musicians, from Jerry Garcia to Joni Mitchell, Ani DiFranco, Pete Seeger, and Elvis Costello. Wrote three books on music, and edited many more. Reported for NPR’s All Things Considered on everything from a concert hall in Indiana Amish country to a rock band in Bangalore to the new world of online recording. Started a songwriter concert series. Played tabla in a TV commercial in India.

All this has been very much unplanned--one project and medium leading to another--and yet in retrospect all makes sense: it’s all about words and music, combining in ever-changing ways and viewed from countless angles. Hence the name of this website. And of my Words and Music record label. And Words and Music Songwriter Showcase. And so on.

Since you’ve clicked your way here, I suspect we share this passion and curiosity about words and music.

Good to meet you.
JPR

P.S. You can find out more about my work as an author here and as a magazine/book editor here.

FAST FACTS

Yes, Pepper is my real middle name--it's the last name of my great uncle. In sixth grade, I failed in a campaign to get classmates to call me Pepper. When I began writing professionally after college, I decided to use my full name and asked my editor at the San Francisco Chronicle to change my byline. She nixed the idea at first, preferring the casual Jeff Rodgers, but at the time I happened to be writing a review of a book by Joyce Carol Oates. So I told her fine, I’d go by Jeff Rodgers as long as the review said the book was by Joyce Oates. She laughed and relented, and I’ve been Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers ever since.

I started performing in New Jersey bars with my brother, Dru (currently with the world rock band Kazamoze), long before I was old enough to be allowed in the door. When I was around 15, my brother and I shared our original songs with producer and Patti Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye at his New York studio. (Kaye warned against getting pigeonholed as folkies and commented that unlike many people he knew in the rock 'n' roll business, we actually knew how to play our instruments.)

I studied north Indian tabla drumming both in the U.S., at the famed Ali Akbar College of Music, and in India. In performance, I draw on this training in several original songs accompanied only by frame drum, cajón, or kanjira, a tambourine-like Indian instrument. I have spent several long stints in south India with my family.

I play a guitar custom-made by luthier Linda Manzer, builder of Bruce Cockburn's and Pat Metheny's acoustic guitars. The guitar's headstock inlay is inspired by kolams, a form of Indian folk art. Each morning, many south Indian women create these beautiful symmetrical patterns with white rice flour on their doorsteps.

These days I live outside Syracuse, New York, where in addition to the music, writing, and editing work mentioned above, I teach courses on songwriting and magazine editing at Syracuse University.

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