Singer/songwriter Jefferson Ross will be releasing new album Backstage Balladeer, on March 28th, 2025. Once more, Ross takes on the relationship between major human themes and couches them in the context of his Southern home soil, including life, death, faith, and doubt. However, this is a “truly solo” record from Ross, in which he wrote, played, recorded and mixed each song as well as shooting the photographs on the jacket.
Religion is also a key theme on the album, though Ross clarifies that this is not a Gospel album, a nod to his Pentecostal upbringing which he finds “in conflict with a well-traveled and well-read worldview.” For the album, he wonders, “How much of the old do we have to disregard to embrace the new or can they both dance together?”
Today, we’re very pleased to premier Ross’s song, “Travel”, which hails from Backstage Balladeer. The song will arrive widely on Friday, March 14th, 2024.
If you’re someone who’s ever driven across the country, made a trip to Canada, or gone on a much bigger wander in the world, this track is likely to mean a great deal to you. For musicians, who often live on the road for large portions of their lives, this song will also reflect deep truths about the human experiences that you encounter far and wide. Jefferson Ross takes a song about a universal truth–the ways in which travel builds an empathetic connection between human beings–and makes it much more personal by sharing a large handful of details from his life of meeting people while in transit and the impact it had on him.
Presented almost as a live show in miniature, the song “Travel” weaves between a very punchy and uplifting chorus, which acts as a kind of mantra about the power of travel to remove prejudice, and spoken-word segments where he shares real life details of encounters where fellow humans displayed surprising and heartwarming degrees of kindness the world over. Using some thoughts from Mark Twain as a central thesis, Ross builds on the importance of travel to combat small-mindedness and counter the “inner hanging judge” that we all have inside us.
The song “Travel” is hardly an essay or a sermon, but despite the non-Gospel status of the album, this track has a very uplifting feeling, and that’s down to the music as well as the message. Bright, meditative guitars interweave with layered vocals to conjure the feeling of setting off on a journey of discovery, and capture the sweetness of kind deeds remembered years later. The lifting and intensity of the chorus, each time it returns, delivers a feeling of freedom, as if personal growth lies just around the bend when you are open to new experiences.
In regards to the song “Travel”, Jefferson Ross shares a wise man’s quote which he finds particularly inspirational:
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime—Mark Twain
Jefferson Ross is a Southern folk artist, operating as a songwriter, singer, guitar player, and painter “weaving stories for the ears and the eyes.” Based in Georgia, Jefferson travels throughout the U.S. and Europe performing his original music, and also displays his art at festivals and galleries across the South.
For years, Jefferson lived in Nashville playing for a number recording artists including Terri Clark, and sharing the stage with Country Music greats such as George Strait, Toby Keith, Reba and Vince Gill. He worked as a staff writer for a number of publishers on Music Row including Curb Music. In 2010, he returned to live in Georgia with his wife and daughter and maintains a home and office in Nashville as well.
