**Grand prize winner of the John Lennon Songwriting Contest!**

The new CD, Humming My Way Back Home, is now available at CD Baby, iTunes, and direct from JPR at the "buy album" links below.

Guitarist, percussionist, and vocalist Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers has been writing and playing original songs since he was a teenager. Along the way he has performed at San Francisco clubs with the quartet Heavy Wood, released the solo CD Traveling Songs, scored a rock musical...and played tabla in a TV commercial in India.

Rodgers grew up loving, on the one hand, the emotional depth of Neil Young songs and the heavenly harmonies of Simon and Garfunkel; and on the other, the joyous grooves of Stevie Wonder and the improvisational excursions of the Grateful Dead. His own songs draw from all these wells of American music, with a writer's eye for detail in the lyrics and masterful rock-band-in-a-box guitar work. His solo show mixes originals with inventive covers from the Beatles to Tom Waits, Chris Whitley to Gillian Welch.

He lives outside Syracuse, New York, where in addition to performing he reports on the music scene for NPR's All Things Considered and Acoustic Guitar magazine, edits music books and magazines, and teaches writing and editing at Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.