Mike Jerel Keeps Getting Pulled Back to Columbus. Good.
Some musicians leave a town and never look back. Mike Jerel left Columbus for Atlanta and cannot seem to stop coming home. Two weekends from now, on Sunday, August 16, he'll be back again — this time for a Sunday brunch set at the Goetchius House on Broadway — and if his own words are any guide, he's the one who feels lucky about it.
"The stage keeps pulling back and drawing me back in," Jerel has said of his relationship to performing. Swap "stage" for "Columbus" and the sentence works just as well.
The résumé earns the homecoming billing. Jerel is a native of Ashburn, Georgia, who was raised into music by a grandmother who sang in people's homes while he kept time on drums beside her. He came to Columbus for college, graduated from Columbus State University, and then spent a decade making this city his workshop — a solo R&B-and-soul act one night, the lead voice fronting a Tower of Power-style horn band the next. By the time he decamped for Atlanta, he'd logged the kind of local stage hours that turn a talent into a professional. He calls Columbus "a second home," which is the polite way a Georgia native admits a place raised him.
What he does onstage he describes, without irony, as "music for the soul" — R&B and soul built to land emotionally rather than impress technically. In a live-music economy increasingly run by algorithm and click track, a singer whose entire pitch is feel this is close to a countercultural act.
"I want there to be so much joy in the air," he's said about his hometown sets. It reads like a mission statement, and on the evidence of past Columbus appearances, it's a deliverable one.
Why does one brunch gig warrant a feature? Because Jerel is exactly the kind of artist a music town has to keep claiming even after he's technically moved away. Columbus is small enough that it can't manufacture homegrown talent on an assembly line; when it produces a genuine one — CSU-trained, road-tested, working the soul tradition that runs through this river town all the way back to Ma Rainey at the Liberty Theatre — the correct civic response is to book him, pack the room, and remind him whose second home this is.
There's also a lesson in the shape of his career for every kid gigging The Loft's no-cover Fridays right now. Jerel didn't skip the grind; he was the grind, ten years of it, before Atlanta and beyond came calling. The path from a Columbus stage to a real career runs directly through Columbus stages. He's living proof the local circuit is a launchpad, not a consolation prize.
So here's the plan. Sunday, August 16, brunch at the Goetchius House. Go for the biscuits if you must. Stay because a genuine soul singer this town helped raise is standing a few feet away, doing the thing he keeps getting pulled home to do.
"I would love for the community to come out and experience the entire show," Jerel said. Consider it experienced. Consider him ours.
Sources: Mike Jerel looks forward to bringing soul to Uptown Columbus concert series — WRBL; Live Music — Mike Jerel Sunday Brunch, Goetchius House (allevents.in)