Rising superstar from Weston has built an army of fans that is pushing his music to
the top of the charts.
By Stephen Feller
I knew there would be celebrities there,” Jake Miller says. “At halftime of every Heat and Dolphins game, when everyone was going upstairs to the concessions, I went down, getting lost in the confusion on the way to the sideline seats. Whether it was Chris Brown, Rick Ross, Lil Wayne, Jennifer Lopez, Fergie — I always gave my mixtape to somebody. “Whether they listened to it or even left the stadium with it, I got my name in their head and that’s all I wanted at that point.” Fast-forward to 2013 and they definitely know who Jake Miller is.
“Collide,” the first single from his debut full length, “Us Against Them,” debuted in the top five on iTunes’ hip hop singles chart and top 20 overall. The album will be released on Oct. 29, just days before he starts a 43-date tour at the sold out Fillmore Miami on Nov. 1. The nationwide journey is expected to turn the 20-year-old Weston popstar into a household name. All of this is a long way from the days of nine-year-old Jacob Harris Miller studying video of ‘N SYNC at the MTV Video Music Awards to re-create in his living room. “Me and my friends would have ‘N SYNC birthday parties. We all loved them. I even built a little microphone that came around the side of my head to my mouth. I wanted to be Justin Timberlake more than anything else in the world.” Jake began playing drums, guitar and a little piano, but didn’t start writing songs until he got to Cypress Bay High School in Weston. As word spread through the school that he was rhyming to homemade and sampled beats online, classmates could be heard making fun of him almost as often as they said they liked what he was doing. Already apprehensive about getting onstage or performing in front of any crowd, Jake was unsure he really wanted to pursue music at all. “I was never the type of kid to be in the spotlight,” he says. “I didn’t really know for sure if this was for me. I was getting a lot of hate back then.” Jake started off rapping in the style of Mac Miller, one of his favorite artists at the time, because he saw a “young, white, Jewish kid busting out on the hip hop scene. I thought, if he can do it, I can do it, too. I tried to duplicate his style and it wasn’t me. The one thing, no matter what kind of art you do, you’ve got to put what you know and what you experience into it. “When I started putting myself into the music, making the music I wanted to make instead of what I thought other people wanted to hear, that’s when people started paying attention,” he says. While Mac’s lyrics are focused on money and partying, Jake turned his attention to true-to-life topics like part-time jobs and once falling in love with a girl he met at DelVecchio’s Pizzeria. After he started to write about his own life, Jake got more positive attention for his YouTube posts, including a seemingly random call from the man who would end up as his first manager. Despite how much music he was writing and posting online, and the call about having the talent and music, Jake was still unsure he wanted to get on a stage and take it to the next level.
That is, until a club promoter friend got him on the bill to open for Snoop Dogg in March 2011. With a gaggle of friends dancing behind him, Jake walked out, bringing to the public what had already turned into the positive hip-pop sound he now has. By the time he got to his second show, with Asher Roth, Sean Kingston and Miami-native Flo Rida, Jake knew this was where he should be headed. He’d already won the Samsung- and T-Mobile-sponsored “Kick It With The Band” talent competition and was on his way to performing at that year’s Y-100 Jingle Ball concert. He continued to pick up opening slots at shows around South Florida and was featured on the Big Time Rush single “Lost In Love,” gaining even more attention from the crowd that would eventually drive him to the top of the iTunes charts. Despite the simmering success he was starting to see, Jake was cautious about his music career and enrolled in the honors campus at Florida State University. While attending orientation on the university’s campus in Tallahassee, Jake got a call from a label head in New York asking him to come play a showcase. “That was the turning point,” he says. “I said, ‘Maybe I’ll take a year off of school and give the music a shot.’” The April 2012 release of his debut EP, “Spotlight,” showed him just where it could go, as it topped the iTunes charts the day of its release, got radio airplay around the country, and helped him sell out venues through the end of the year in Boston, Philadelphia and New York, among other places.
“The first time I heard myself on the radio, I was sitting in a car with my family riding through Lion Country Safari. There were giraffes sniffing through the car window and all of a sudden my song came on the radio,” he remembers. “It was crazy.”For all the crazy reaction his family had to the song on the radio, Jake has amassed a literal army of fans — his own reference to the support of his “Miller-tary” is an apt one — and he can’t go many places without being chased around. He says, however, that he loves it. “The day I get used to all the overwhelming response from my fans, that is the day I should stop,” he says without a hint of irony. “I wouldn’t be anything without them. I make it a point to be in contact with them on Facebook, Twitter and any time I’m in public. I don’t want them to think I’m some imaginary person. It’s important.”The vast majority of what Jake writes about in his music is a positive outlook on life and living, something that has inspired and helped those fans, he says, mentioning that he gets email and messages from fans who say his music has done everything from help them through breakups and depression to one fan who stopped cutting herself. “The fact that I can have that kind of effect on people is incredible.”Even so, he continues to have haters who think he’s “just a rich kid from Weston whose parents are paying for his success. It just isn’t true,” he says. “I was raised to work work work — that’s my family and my mindset. I bagged groceries, I served ice cream, I cleaned golf carts at Bonaventure Golf Club. There was never a time I was being lazy. I was always working.” That work, of course, included chasing down celebrities at games, trying to stuff homemade mix-CDs of his work into their hands — just like many fans are now doing to him. Jake learned a lot from those artists sometimes taking the discs and sometimes not, and it’s why he does what he can to give as much attention to fans and aspiring artists as possible. “I would never want to feel the way that some artists made me feel,” he says. “It taught me a lot. It wasn’t that long ago when I was in that position, begging artists to check me out. I try to look at it from that point of view. I’m all about returning that favor — I feel like I owe it to myself.”
COME MEET JAKE MILLER!
Meet & Greet
DelVecchio’s Pizzeria, Weston Town Center
Saturday, Oct 12 from 12-2pm