Action Jackson
Cheyenne Jackson has already conquered the Great White Way and Thursday night TV. Now he's going after the Billboard charts.
By Matthew Schneier
Photographed by Will Anderson
Imagine you're on the factory floor of a paper mill somewhere on the rural border that divides northwestern Idaho from Washington state. Small town of 1,200 souls, an Aryan Nation compound in the near distance. Imagine a young man driving a forklift laden with wet lap -- a kind of pre-paper pulp -- to the mulcher. Grueling work. The forklift backs up with a warning: beep beep! Now imagine this young man who, in his own words, "just could not do it without harmonizing a third below the beeps." Where else could this kid go -- where else would you imagine him -- but Broadway?
Meet Cheyenne Jackson: now known as America's own openly gay Broadway veteran-sitcom star-AIDS activist, here to present to you an album of self-penned, self-arranged, hell, self-lead-and-backup-sung, rock songs. They've made action figures for less.
"I've never been diagnosed with it, but I think I have a bit of ADD -- I get bored," Jackson says. It's 2012, and he's sitting on a couch in a conference room, the same day his first single, from his first solo album, has debuted on Perez Hilton. (Hilton says it's a masterpiece.) He's ticked Broadway musicals, film roles, and 30 Rock off his bucket list. "What's your favorite, television, film, or stage -- it's the oldest question," he says. "As cheesy as it sounds, for me, it truly is whatever I'm doing right then."
Still, singing his own songs is what Jackson says he's always wanted to do. "In acting, in singing, in anything I've ever done, you're always someone else," he explains. "You're saying someone else's words and inhabiting a character. Music is so personal, and my lyrics are my soul and my guts and there's really no way to say it other than to be Alanis Morissette-y about it. You write about what you know and what I know is my experience. And I've just been letting it all out."
Urged on by his friend, Australian popster Sia, Jackson put pen to paper and wrote an album full of songs of the sort he'd been quietly writing his entire life, ever since his mother first taught him to sing harmony at the age of three. He grew up poor and music was the constant entertainment. "For a period of time we had no running water. My mom hates when I say that. I did a concert at Carnegie Hall and I was talking about where I was from, and she said, 'Are you going to mention the no running water?' I said, 'Mom, it's kind of an amazing thing.' She's like, 'That was only for two years!'" Mom taught herself the guitar and played Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan; the family's two goats were named Harmony and Melody.
The route from the Gem State to the recording studio was circuitous, cutting through a semester of college in Spokane, chasing the dream to New York, and eventual success on stage (playing leads in All Shook Up, Xanadu and Finian's Rainbow) and screen. (He and his husband, physicist Monte Lapka, have now lived in New York for 11 years and counting; they married last year.) Through it all, he says, "I don't ever remember a world where music wasn't a huge part of my life. When I told my family that I was writing, there was a cumulative sigh -- of course you are. That's where it all started."
Where it's ended -- so far -- is his debut EP, Drive, an album of melodic, hard-driving pop songs, surging if slightly melancholic. One record-company exec told Jackson he'd be what you'd get "if Adele and George Michael had a baby, but then listened to a bunch of Sting when they were preggers." His songs are more emotional than much of radio's current pablum. "The songs that I think are the most successful are the ones that I think are true experiences," he says. "Pain. Heartache. Ecstasy. Love." The titular first single, "Drive" takes on madness. When he performed it at Vienna's annual AIDS-benefit Life Ball in May, it marked only the second time he'd ever performed one of his own songs publicly. (The first was at Carnegie Hall.) The audience numbered more than 40,000. "I never really do anything small," he shrugs.
Whether Drive, out July 31, will catapult Jackson to stardom remains to be seen. For the moment, he remains a known quantity to a relatively cloistered few. New York theater reviews don't necessarily reach the country's expansive middle. Though Glee, on which he guests as rival choir director Dustin Goolsby, is a nationwide hit, 30 Rock remains an elite pleasure. "When I first got on it, my mom didn't even know it was a show. She was talking to one of my relatives about it, and she was going, 'No, it's supposed to be like that...'" (Tina Fey wrote the part of Danny, the sensitive and naïve actor, specifically for Jackson after seeing him in Xanadu.)
Still, you can't shake the feeling that getting the songs off his chest might just be reward enough for the boy who couldn't resist singing along with the forklift. "I have insomnia, I always have," Jackson says. "I just woke up a few months ago and a song came to me, music and lyrics. I went to the piano, and boom. Song written. And then I could sleep."
Stylist: Luigi Tadini
Grooming: Margina Dennis for Camera Reader Cosmetics. Special thanks to Chelsea Daylight Studios.
Jacket by PRPS Field and Stream, shirt by Topman, and pants by J Brand
Meet Cheyenne Jackson: now known as America's own openly gay Broadway veteran-sitcom star-AIDS activist, here to present to you an album of self-penned, self-arranged, hell, self-lead-and-backup-sung, rock songs. They've made action figures for less.
"I've never been diagnosed with it, but I think I have a bit of ADD -- I get bored," Jackson says. It's 2012, and he's sitting on a couch in a conference room, the same day his first single, from his first solo album, has debuted on Perez Hilton. (Hilton says it's a masterpiece.) He's ticked Broadway musicals, film roles, and 30 Rock off his bucket list. "What's your favorite, television, film, or stage -- it's the oldest question," he says. "As cheesy as it sounds, for me, it truly is whatever I'm doing right then."
Still, singing his own songs is what Jackson says he's always wanted to do. "In acting, in singing, in anything I've ever done, you're always someone else," he explains. "You're saying someone else's words and inhabiting a character. Music is so personal, and my lyrics are my soul and my guts and there's really no way to say it other than to be Alanis Morissette-y about it. You write about what you know and what I know is my experience. And I've just been letting it all out."
Urged on by his friend, Australian popster Sia, Jackson put pen to paper and wrote an album full of songs of the sort he'd been quietly writing his entire life, ever since his mother first taught him to sing harmony at the age of three. He grew up poor and music was the constant entertainment. "For a period of time we had no running water. My mom hates when I say that. I did a concert at Carnegie Hall and I was talking about where I was from, and she said, 'Are you going to mention the no running water?' I said, 'Mom, it's kind of an amazing thing.' She's like, 'That was only for two years!'" Mom taught herself the guitar and played Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan; the family's two goats were named Harmony and Melody.
The route from the Gem State to the recording studio was circuitous, cutting through a semester of college in Spokane, chasing the dream to New York, and eventual success on stage (playing leads in All Shook Up, Xanadu and Finian's Rainbow) and screen. (He and his husband, physicist Monte Lapka, have now lived in New York for 11 years and counting; they married last year.) Through it all, he says, "I don't ever remember a world where music wasn't a huge part of my life. When I told my family that I was writing, there was a cumulative sigh -- of course you are. That's where it all started."
Where it's ended -- so far -- is his debut EP, Drive, an album of melodic, hard-driving pop songs, surging if slightly melancholic. One record-company exec told Jackson he'd be what you'd get "if Adele and George Michael had a baby, but then listened to a bunch of Sting when they were preggers." His songs are more emotional than much of radio's current pablum. "The songs that I think are the most successful are the ones that I think are true experiences," he says. "Pain. Heartache. Ecstasy. Love." The titular first single, "Drive" takes on madness. When he performed it at Vienna's annual AIDS-benefit Life Ball in May, it marked only the second time he'd ever performed one of his own songs publicly. (The first was at Carnegie Hall.) The audience numbered more than 40,000. "I never really do anything small," he shrugs.
Whether Drive, out July 31, will catapult Jackson to stardom remains to be seen. For the moment, he remains a known quantity to a relatively cloistered few. New York theater reviews don't necessarily reach the country's expansive middle. Though Glee, on which he guests as rival choir director Dustin Goolsby, is a nationwide hit, 30 Rock remains an elite pleasure. "When I first got on it, my mom didn't even know it was a show. She was talking to one of my relatives about it, and she was going, 'No, it's supposed to be like that...'" (Tina Fey wrote the part of Danny, the sensitive and naïve actor, specifically for Jackson after seeing him in Xanadu.)
Still, you can't shake the feeling that getting the songs off his chest might just be reward enough for the boy who couldn't resist singing along with the forklift. "I have insomnia, I always have," Jackson says. "I just woke up a few months ago and a song came to me, music and lyrics. I went to the piano, and boom. Song written. And then I could sleep."
Stylist: Luigi Tadini
Grooming: Margina Dennis for Camera Reader Cosmetics. Special thanks to Chelsea Daylight Studios.
Jacket by PRPS Field and Stream, shirt by Topman, and pants by J Brand
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