On the Record with Jake & Shelby

Jake & Shelby are the internet's favorite duo. The Nashville based, the indie-pop singer/songwriter duo quickly conquered the digital music scene with their charming covers, posting them across the board to their Instagram and Tik Tok with users noting their undoubtable musical compatibility. Their renditions of songs like Lizzy McApline’s “Ceilings” and The 1975’s “Somebody Else” is what showcase the exact magnitude of their impressive range. After posting their extensive backlog of covers and building quite the following-turned-community, the two put out their own original music, with their first release “Sway,” in 2022.

Now three years in, the dynamic duo released multiple singles, an enchanting deluxe EP equipped with outdoor live versions as well, and are now in preparation for their debut album, “Learning to Love” out October 10 with EMPIRE.

They sat down On The Record to talk about their early days and the making of the album. Read the preview below and see the full interview here.

For anyone just discovering Jake and Shelby as a duo, can you introduce yourselves? Who are you? How did this begin? Where did it start? Take me through that story.

Shelby: We're Jake and Shelby, a singer-songwriter duo, and we've been a duo for three years now. We met at a little music school in Hendersonville called Cedarstone and joined some groups together. We were in a cover band, actually two cover bands, and an a cappella group. And we were doing that for a long time and it was really fun. We actually didn't really like talk very much in the beginning though because we have a little age difference and we're both pretty shy so those two things kept us apart for a long time. Jake wanted to start songwriting, and his dad, who was teaching me songwriting at the time, suggested he try writing with me and another friend. And we did that for a long time and we really liked doing that and we did it for like a year before we became a duo officially.

Jake: And now we've been a duo for three years. Did you already say that?

Shelby: Yeah.

Jake: But yeah, we've been doing it and we started on social media. That's kind of just like where we started. So we've done a lot on there and we're just now releasing our first debut record.

Congrats on that record! I know it's coming out in October, so it's a bit far out, but that's awesome… Tell me about how the social media scene started. Can you take me back to your early covers and what it was like to put yourselves out on the internet?

Jake: I mean at first we kind of just like ‘Let's do this every day and see how it goes,’ and kind of like, let's commit to doing this. And I mean we kind of just started with just choosing songs that we enjoyed together and like to play it together.

Shelby: Yeah, we started with a lot of covers on social media. And that's kind of how we got started. And I guess, it wasn't super natural, like posting out of nowhere because I feel like we both didn't really post on social media that often before we just started posting every day as a duo. But once we started doing it, I feel like we got the hang of it and it was really fun to like build a community, and we were really fortunate that it really didn't take long at all for people to start finding our music. And even before we released any music, just like watching our videos and stuff. Which is really cool to think about that it happened so fast.

Learning to Love is available on streaming platforms on October 10.