JAY SPEARS: Playin' On My Team?

Living in his native Los Angeles, Jay Spears' debut CD "BOY HOWDY" featured humorous, gay-friendly boy-meets-boy pop tunes with titles like "I LIKE MIKE" and "CRYIN' OVER BRIAN". The I LIKE MIKE music video, featuring swing-dancing baseball players, played in film festivals worldwide, and was the first music vid ever to play on Viacom's LOGO channel.

BOY HOWDY was nominated for Outstanding Album 2003 by Outmusic, and earned Jay compliments like "the gay love-child of Randy Newman and Tom Waits".

Jay's sophomore CD "PLAYIN ON MY TEAM" includes the full-choir gospel rocker, "SMAK DEM CHRISTIANS DOWN", the video for which has over 60,000 views on youtube.

Born and bred on the Beatles, Jay's guitar and songwriting style is greatly influenced by cinema and theatre. In college Jay earned his daily bread playing guitar, banjo, & mandolin in the pit orchestras for musicals in the university drama department, everything from Hello Dolly to Man of La Mancha to Jesus Christ Superstar. As a result his songs have strong characters, story, even dialogue, plus chord changes and harmonies with a distinctly American Theater vibe.

Now working on his third CD, Jay's perspective and focus is broadening, taking on life in the Big City with tunes like "When The Big One Hits" about our fab yet shaky Southern California lifestyle, "Guy In The Sky" about God or lack thereof, and "Meat", about, well, meat. Hear them here.

"On the whole it is a gently comic vision, but it is always subtly subversive and it occasionally erupts into full-on political activism. Spears is an eccentric and an original, less pretentious than the established gay pop stars, but funnier, more radical and more now. It would be easy to dismiss him as a clown, but on closer inspection his work is quite profound.
Jay Spears is funny, angry, sexy, generous and badly-behaved. He enjoys himself more than a pop star should. He has no interest in being cool or post-modern or evasive. He is a true heir of the '60s, when style and political engagement were more congruent, and pop music had more spiritual energy."