The last time Eatonton’s own Matt Rogers played at The Plaza Arts Center was March 2022 on the main stage with a full band backing him up in front of a sold-out house.
On Oct. 14, he’ll return to host the Homegrown Talent Concert on The Plaza’s front steps and play a few songs solo, just him and an acoustic guitar.
“There's nothing like playing at home,” declares Rogers, who moved to his mother’s longtime and ancestral hometown in 2003 as a teenager. “A lot of these folks understand and know how long I've been doing this and how hard I've worked.
So definitely, at the end of the day, those are the people you want to make most proud. So, coming home to them and sharing new songs or sharing new stories is kind of my favorite thing to do.”
Appearing with Rogers at The Plaza’s Homegrown Talent Concert will be Luke Boswell, RJ Sanders and Fall Line Rambler.
Spending his early childhood in Jones County, Rogers says he started to take music seriously about 2000 after joining his local church band.
“I just played praise worship music and then started to sing,” he recalls. “Obviously, you start to get an ear for it, being in church with the hymns and music and everything and it all just started from that.”
After graduating in 2006 from Gatewood, where he played on the football, basketball, and baseball teams, as well as running track, Rogers went on to attend St. Andrews University in Laurinburg, N.C., where he had both academic and athletic scholarships to study biology with a focus in forensics.
He also had music scholarship money, so part of his curriculum included “a lot of choir classes and a lot of music theory and guitar.”
“That's when my creative side really got to blossom, too, because I had a little bit more time to concentrate and I was having to do it for courses I took. It was nice to be able to practice a lot more and really get into the bands and the music that I liked,” Rogers says.
Plus, he and a college buddy often played gigs in college together, “just a little duo thing where we would kind of just play covers for beer and hot wings and things like that. But when I came home from my undergrad, I started gigging a lot more and that’s how it all got started.”
Pretty soon, Rogers says, he turned away from work in the medical imaging field, where he had started helping a group of neurosurgeons.
“I followed them and did a lot of work on spine surgery and brain surgery and aneurysm coils and all kinds of stuff, but I was kind of gigging the whole time while I was doing that,” he says. “While I was in school, it was always kind of a side hustle of sorts.
“Then it just kept growing to the point where I was like, ‘Man, I could maybe make this a career and it's something I really love.’ So I started trying to figure out how to make music a career and started saving my pennies and made the move (to Nashville) in 2015 and haven't looked back.”
Rogers continues to live in Nashville and says he’s “touring like crazy right now,” doing shows throughout the United States, though mostly in the South and Midwest. When he makes his Eatonton appearance in October, he’ll be recently returned from songwriting events and concerts in the United Kingdom and Denmark.
Rogers’ most recent project was the Sept. 15 release of a new single, “Tea was a Little Sweeter,” available on all major music platforms.
“It’s just about some things I miss and the video for it was filmed all in Eatonton by my buddy Justin so there's a lot of familiar sites and a lot of familiar things that people there are going to know,” Rogers points out. “Just talking about it gets me excited about how I’m going to be back in October and doing that Plaza show, kind of recognizing local talent and the people there.”
With his parents now retired but still living at Lake Oconee in Putnam County, Rogers knows he’ll have plenty of family and friends around him at The Plaza show, too.
“I just feel incredibly blessed just to have an outlet and to have people that support me and to be able to talk about my music and to do the things that I get to do and have that kind of support system and it’s all basically in Putnam County,” he says. “There have been lots of twists and turns. The highs are very high, and the lows can be pretty low. But for the most part, I just feel incredibly blessed to be a part of all of it.”