Bearing Torches’ Jon Ellison took an unlikely path to rock and roll

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If Jon Ellison’s rough voice reminds you of certain iconic rockers, that would be because those artists — Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen — made for a secret passion during his teenage years. Very secret because Ellison was raised in a small Oklahoma town in a strict Baptist sect. To Ellison’s parents and the community he grew up in — where he eventually became a minister — rock music was the devil’s work.

Now 30, Ellison has been fronting the rock band Bearing Torches since its first performance, a March 2014 show at the Riot Room. His days as a minister are long over, but things are just getting started for the band, which has since relocated from Kansas City to Nashville. Friday at the Tank Room, Bearing Torches releases its debut full-length, Someplace Like America. I chatted with Ellison from his Nashville home about the long road to this record.

The Pitch: So you guys started in Kansas City, and now you’re in Nashville. Tell me about the decision to move.

Ellison: We came down here 10 months ago to record, and we’ve kind of been in that process ever since. We were working with two different people in Kansas City to cut the record, and it was progressing extremely slowly. It just felt like a depressing experience. But we had some friends that had reached out from Nashville, and the resources and the infrastructure for making a record are a lot different here. We decided that we’d give it a shot. We came down to visit, but we realized it was going to be an immersive process.

Our bass player and our accordion player from Kansas City couldn’t commit to the move. We basically came down here without a house or anything, and it was dark days trying to come down here and get things pulled together. We had to recruit players to come in and finish the record. We found this house in Nashville that we could stay at, and we rehearsed five days a week in this freezing cold basement. And in late spring, we finally started going to the studio to cut the record.

Are there any transferable skills from your time as a minister?

When you break it down to the core, I think there’s a lot of similarities that are there. I think the ability to set aside one’s ego in exchange for the larger perspective, viewing experiences that you have had or channeling someone else’s experiences — that’s something that was important as a minister, and the application is enormously similar in music. The art for understanding people, the constant search for common denominators, the ability to help people connect — those were important as a minister, and they’re also important as an artist.

And I’m really grateful for that path [as a minister]. It helps me keep perspective when a lot of these other things are happening: publicists and management and dealing with all of the extra stuff that comes with putting out a record. I wouldn’t have that perspective if I didn’t have the path that I did.

Your upbringing was really strict, so how were you able to develop a heavy, loud rock voice? Were you just going into closets and screaming?

Yeah, it’s odd…. There was the most popular girl in our church. She introduced me to this group when I was 16. I was sitting in church, and she shows me this record — this Boyz II Men record — and she was like, “This is something that I could see you doing.” And it blew my mind. If you can imagine never hearing anything with a beat — no rock music — and you develop all these emotions and all these things that popular music really appeals to, but you just have never been exposed to it, and then it just hits you. I mean, it became the obsession of my later teenage years.

I got my hands on this old Bon Jovi CD, and I immediately showed this new music to my twin sister. We had these old clock radios, and we put them under our pillows at night, and we’d literally listen to rock music through our pillows when we were supposed to be sleeping. I’d take these cassette tapes during the day when I was mowing the lawn or whatever. I’d put them in my Walkman and I would try to mimic the singing — “Summer of ’69” or “Livin’ on a Prayer.” For whatever reason, I had a knack for that type of singing. It felt natural, like singing along to the radio.

And actually, Bob Ludwig, the guy that mixed and mastered our record — he was the guy who did the Bon Jovi records and Springsteen and Bryan Adams. So when we talked about the song structure and the vocals and all this stuff, it ended up being a full-circle moment for me.

When we last talked, your band was still relatively newly formed, and your family was not so supportive. Has that changed?

It’s been interesting. My parents, they don’t endorse what we’re doing. There are certain things that extreme environments create, these ultimatum moments, these things that can leave you with some scars. My little brother joined my band, and rock music wasn’t allowed in our environment growing up, and now half the kids are making it.

But as time has gone on, our family has seen how hard we work. For them, you gotta understand, all they know of rock music is urban legends — every stereotype that filters through the Christian environment. Now, all they see of us is how positive the music feels and how people respond to it. And a lot of the same aspects I found in ministry are in our music. I get the impression that they still don’t endorse the music. They don’t say, “That’s the career we would have picked for you.” But there are things you can be proud of in your kids no matter what, and I think they see our tenacity and how hard we work for this.

And music has this healing power, too. Just a couple days ago, I had a really emotional, really healing conversation with my mom about it. We just want to keep moving forward with it and see what happens. If you’re going to do this, to make a record like this, you have to put the best version of yourself into it. When you do that, only good things can happen.