What artist launched his career as a hard-touring heavy metal singer, then switched gears to become a church worship leader, before finally signing a Nashville record deal and making his mark as a songwriter and soulful R&B-groove-pop artist?
Well, if the question comes up some day, you’ll already know the answer: Jordan Feliz.
Fronting the West Coast buzz band A Current Affair gave Jordan’s powerful vocals some major exposure right out of high school. The band performed on the Warped Tour and other high profile gigs before dissolving. But heavy metal was never Jordan’s passion; it was just a fun experience with his friends to grow musically. As a child, Jordan grew up with R&B artists like Sam Cooke and Earth Wind & Fire providing the soundtrack to his frequent road trips to a ski resort with his family. Artists from what his father called “the good music era.” Those were the sounds and stylings that stuck in Jordan’s musical memory and by the time he was old enough to realize that his own singing voice was a gift, it was those early groove-funk-soul singers that had shaped his personal aesthetic. If he was going to make records, those were the kind of influences he wanted to draw from.
After his move from California to Nashville, Jordan was invited to participate in an unsigned artists retreat hosted by Centricity Music. It was the combination of Jordan’s nuanced vocal abilities, the freshness of his retro-influenced melodies and songwriting, and his warm, enthusiastic personality that spurred label execs to take a closer look and ultimately sign him.
Jordan Feliz’s debut project, Beloved, brings the rich influence of 70’s sensibilities into a modern pop context. Intentionally constructing uncluttered tracks free of production tricks and excessive instrumentation, Jordan instead focused on arrangements that were designed to give the vocals center stage. The songs on the Beloved 10 song album are soul-influenced pop numbers, and the instruments present are articulate in their voicings and melodies, saying only as much as they need to.
“I was the kid growing up with the headphones on listening to every lick and reading the lyrics,” Jordan says. “My dad had a collection of cassettes. My mom had some vinyl. I discovered artists like the Commodores, Bill Withers, and Nat King Cole through them. When I was in the studio making Beloved, I told my producers I didn’t want thirty guitars stacked on one track. I didn’t want five different guitar tones. I want to put one guitar sound on a song and find a way to make that one lick sound massive, the way those 70’s artists were able to do. If you stack too many sounds on one track you can lose the song in all that clutter. Building ‘clean’ tracks on Beloved was very intentional.”