Competing with a mini Kindle on his bedside table is a sturdy stack of all of this week's issues: Harper's, Spin, Wired, The Atlantic, Esquire, Newsweek. "I've kept everything I've read since freshman year," Jamie explains as we enter his bedroom in Fahey 103. "When I finally picked them up from storage this term, there were six boxes, must have been a couple hundred pounds heavy."
What is Jamie's real interest behind all the covers? He'll tell you it's the music industry. Sophomore year, he interned at Rolling Stone. Shortly after, he came out with his own album one of the only CDs you'll find in his room. On the cover, a younger, straggly-haired Jamie stands in the red light of a diner sign above him. A record player on his dorm table hosts "Exile on Main Street" and an open drawer shows a thick stash of vinyls. His favorite item in his room? A Takamine guitar, "the same one that Bruce Springsteen plays."
Jamie's musical roots trace loyally back to his childhood down south in Nashville hence the Rocky Votalato and B.B. King posters on his wall. As a senior fellow, he's writing a book on how digitalization has changed the game for singers, songwriters and music producers finding particular resonance in his hometown, where he recently interviewed Jack White and the "father of the 1990s country music boom" Jim Foglesong over spring break.
In Fahey 103, Jamie's in a band of sorts. Out in the hallway, there's a bar that he and his suitemates built from scratch. "First we built the bookshelf and then my suitemate Alex, an engineer, figured out how to get the wooden plank to stand by itself next to it," he explains. "It turned out there wasn't a plug on that side of the room, so,in order to stack the two refrigerators on one another, we threaded wires through the ceiling and plugged them in on the other side." I look up to see a wire running through a couple magazines at the tail end of Jamie's giant periodical montage. "I made sure you could still make out the cover stories."
