Weekend Diversion: Drake Jensen

The video above is by Drake Jensen, who I’d never heard of until today, not until someone I know on Twitter re-Tweeted someone I didn’t know. So, following the trail, I read how Drake describes himself on Twitter:

North America's first open gay male country recording artist. Drake's priority? To make sure country fans in the LGBT community have a voice of representation."

I’m not much of a country fan, gay or otherwise, but I do like some songs and some artists. And yet, I’ve been aware that country music has long had a solidly heterosexual focus—actually, that’s part of why I’ve never become a big fan: I can’t relate to much of country music as easily as I can to pop music which is, more often than not, general in nature. Pop music is also more likely to have openly gay artists.

But I do like the idea of gay country performers bringing some “realness” to the genre—that’s definitely a good thing. Drake seems very positive and eager to interact with his fans—something that rates very highly for me (only a few recording artists that I follow also follow me back; Drake followed back within minutes—he gets bonus points for that).

And, fortunately, I like what I’ve heard so far. The video above is “On My Way To Finding You”, the first single from Drake’s debut album of the same name. It, the album and his second single, “Scars”, are all available from iTunes. The video below is “All You Need”, another song from his debut album, and a song I like a lot.

Drake's website has more information about him.

Well, this has been a week of music firsts for me: I blogged about a hip-hop artist and now I’m blogging about a country artist. Clearly, anything’s possible.