John Leroy Blake has been writing most of his life. It just took him nearly fifty years to realize some of those stories were supposed to become songs.
Born May 5, 1975, in Corpus Christi, Texas, John spent much of his childhood moving around. Before he reached the third grade, his family had lived in Corpus Christi, Houston, Ventura, Thornton, Seibert, and eventually Odessa, Texas — the West Texas city that would become home.
John grew up in a working-class family where replacing something simply because it was broken wasn't usually an option. You fixed it.
His stepfather, Victor — the man John called Dad — was a jack of all trades who seemed capable of repairing or building just about anything. He taught John a philosophy that stayed with him: if someone asks whether you can do something, say yes. You can figure out how to do it afterward.
That willingness to figure things out became part of John's personality.
His mother, Barbara, worked primarily in convenience stores and had a habit of quickly working her way into management. From her, John learned another lesson that would follow him throughout his life: work hard enough that people notice.
His grandfather worked in the oilfield and repeatedly gave John one piece of career advice: stay out of the oilfield.
John did not take that advice.
John also grew up with an older sister, Rebecca, whose influence would extend far beyond childhood. Where John had a habit of finding trouble, Rebecca seemed to be the one who did everything right. She was the straight-A student, the steady one, and eventually became something even more important to him.
Through the different chapters of John's life — the good decisions and the bad ones, relationships, family, career pressures, losses and starting over — Rebecca remained one of the constants. She believed in him when he didn't always believe in himself, stood beside him when life became difficult, and more than once helped hold him together when things felt like they were coming apart.
She was his big sister growing up. She became his rock as an adult. She still is.
A Writer Before a Songwriter
Long before JB75Music existed, John wrote.
In high school, he wrote for the school newspaper and spent his final two years as sports editor, even having his own column. Outside school, he wrote letters — particularly when there happened to be a girl he wanted to impress — and poetry wherever inspiration happened to find him, including while sitting around waiting on clothes at the laundromat.
He even tried writing songs.
Those early songs disappeared somewhere along the way. John wishes they hadn't. Not necessarily because they were good — he suspects some probably weren't — but because whatever he was writing about back then was part of his story.
Writing never really went away. Neither did daydreaming.
John has always had a tendency to watch people and imagine the parts of their lives he cannot see: what they might be struggling with, what brought them to where they are, and how one seemingly insignificant decision or moment could completely change the direction of someone's life.
Sometimes he imagines how things could have turned out better. Sometimes worse. That habit would eventually become an important part of his songwriting. First, however, life gave him plenty of stories of his own.
Growing Up Because Someone Needed Him To
Fatherhood arrived unexpectedly.
John learned he had a two-and-a-half-year-old son named Brandon. The news changed the direction of his life almost immediately.
Suddenly John wasn't only responsible for himself anymore. He had a son.
Brandon became his pride and joy, and John decided it was time to grow up. In his mind, that required at least two things: get a real job and build a family. He did both.
John went to work in the oilfield and eventually married. A daughter, Meagan, followed, and fatherhood changed him again.
When Brandon later moved to Germany with his mother, John struggled with losing the everyday presence of his son. He held even tighter to the relationship he had with Meagan, who became a daddy's girl through and through.
Meagan was the reason he didn’t give up — on life, on becoming a better man. She lifted him up with her tiny hands, and everything he did afterward, he did trying to be worthy of her. Years later, another daughter came into his life: Breyanne — Bree — who he took in and raised as his own. Where Meagan gave him a reason, Bree gave him permission — she’s the one who taught him to follow his dreams and be who he was meant to be. Biology mattered less to him than showing up. He coached sports, taught what he knew, and learned that being someone’s father was never about whose name was on a birth certificate.
Coaching reinforced something he already believed: details matter. In football, which foot moves first matters. In baseball, where the bat moves first matters. Small things change outcomes. Years later, John would discover the same principle applied to songs.
Life in the Oilfield
Despite his grandfather's warnings, John began working in the oilfield at 23.
Living in the heart of the Permian Basin made avoiding it difficult. The work was demanding and the money could be good, but John also saw the other side of the industry — the injuries, accidents and consequences when something went wrong.
His career eventually moved into safety and operations leadership.
That brought John back to writing, although not the kind he'd done at the laundromat: policies, procedures, standard operating procedures, safety documents and incident investigations.
Investigating accidents required him to reconstruct stories from details. What happened? What happened immediately before it? What changed? What did someone see? What did they miss? Could one seemingly insignificant detail explain everything that followed?
After decades of writing and reviewing those documents, writing became almost second nature. John jokes that he enjoys writing almost as much as he enjoys breathing. Usually.
The same attention to detail eventually followed him into songwriting. A date, an empty room, a smile, an old car, something someone said years ago — small details can carry enormous stories.
Love, Family and the Quiet That Followed
John's longest relationship lasted eight years before marriage. Amy became his queen.
Both brought a son and daughter into the relationship, and their lives became a blended family. John developed a particularly strong father-daughter relationship with Amy's daughter and came to consider her one of his own.
Music also became part of the life they built together.
Amy had a beautiful singing voice, and it was singing with her that drew John into karaoke. Beside her, he had confidence behind a microphone. What began as something they enjoyed together soon became a regular part of their weekends. John bought the equipment, friends came over to drink and sing, and eventually people began asking them to bring the karaoke setup to their homes.
For years, singing was simply part of their life together.
The marriage eventually ended. John doesn't frame that chapter around blame. Something important existed, and then life changed.
But more disappeared with the marriage than he initially realized.
By then, his children were grown and building lives of their own. The family that had once given everyday life its rhythm wasn't under the same roof anymore. The weekends of friends, music and singing had grown quiet too.
John never stopped loving to sing. What he lost was the confidence to do it in front of other people. Amy had unknowingly become his security behind the microphone, and without her beside him, singing became something private again.
At work, meanwhile, John had become the boss. His responsibilities didn't end when he left the office. Operations ran 24 hours a day, which meant decisions, phone calls and problems could arrive at any hour. Other people expected him to have answers.
Work filled the busy spaces. The quiet spaces were harder.
For a period, John tried drinking his way around some of what he was feeling. It didn't solve anything. It mostly made already difficult decisions worse.
He tried relationships again, but something had changed. Getting close to someone meant accepting the possibility of losing someone again. Sometimes walking away first felt easier.
The man who spent his working life solving problems eventually encountered one he couldn't repair with a wrench, a procedure or an investigation.
So he returned to something that had been there almost his entire life.
He started writing.
The Name Before the Music
Interestingly, JB75 existed long before JB75Music.
Years earlier, while John and Amy were married, Amy had become exceptionally good at embroidery. John told her that someday he wanted a brand of his own.
He didn't know what the brand would be. He didn't know what he would sell. He didn't even know exactly what he wanted to do with it.
He just knew the name.
JB75. John Blake. Born in 1975.
Amy embroidered the logo onto several hats for him. For years, JB75 remained exactly that — an idea with a name, waiting for a purpose.
About a decade later, it found one.
House Gone Still
The first song John wrote in this new chapter of his life was House Gone Still.
It wasn't written because he had decided to launch a music career. It came from something much simpler.
Silence.
After years of children, relationships, responsibilities, friends, karaoke and a house filled with the movement of family life, John found himself coming home from a demanding job to a house that had become remarkably quiet.
Writing about it gave the feeling somewhere to go.
One song became another. Then another.
Stories about relationships appeared. Songs about family followed. Faith found its way into the writing. So did the oilfield, West Texas, regret, humor, loneliness, memories, people John had known and moments that probably seemed insignificant when they happened.
And although John doesn't publicly perform the songs he writes, he does sing them. Privately.
He still enjoys singing and occasionally records himself, but those recordings aren't released. The confidence he once had singing beside Amy never completely returned. So the finished JB75Music recordings may carry other voices, while John's own versions remain something mostly heard within the walls of his home.
For someone who spent years writing without music and later singing without an audience, the two finally found each other.
The old JB75 had found its purpose.
JB75Music was born.
Pieces of My Life, Set to Music
John doesn't pretend every song is a literal diary entry.
Some are. Others begin with something real and wander somewhere else. Some come from watching another person's life and imagining the parts of the story nobody else sees. Others begin with a simple question: what if one moment had gone differently?
That freedom is also why JB75Music refuses to belong to a single genre.
A story determines what it needs to sound like. Sometimes that's country or Americana. Sometimes rock, alternative or acoustic. Another story may call for Spanish influences, accordion or steel guitar. Some have crossed languages and cultures entirely, reaching into Spanish, Indonesian and Japanese — and John sees no particular reason to stop there.
Technology has given him another tool in that process. John uses AI-assisted music production not simply as a substitute for his own voice, but as a way to shape the sound he already hears in his head. The voice can be male or female, younger or older, clean or weathered and raspy. The arrangement might need steel guitar, accordion, acoustic guitar or something entirely unexpected.
Those choices aren't random. They're part of the story.
John still sings his own songs privately, and he still records himself from time to time. But when producing music for JB75Music, he isn't limited by the instrument he can personally play or the voice he happens to have. The production can become whatever the story needs it to become.
That's also why trying to place JB75Music permanently inside one genre has never made much sense to him. There are too many stories. Too many personalities. Too many sounds, cultures and perspectives in the world to tell every story from the same musical chair.
For John, music has never been about staying in a lane.
Music is food for the soul. Who wants to eat the same thing every day?
Until then, he writes. Not because every story has a happy ending. Not because he's figured everything out. And certainly not because life went according to plan.
He writes because the people mattered. The moments mattered. The details mattered.
And sometimes the best thing you can do with a life you didn't quite expect… is turn it into a song.