James Hough may not look like your typical country-music fan, but the Vegas-based visual artist grew up in Oklahoma, where country was a way of life. In typical teen-rebellion fashion, he resisted it for a while. “I hated it for a long time,” he says. “It was all around me, and I liked pop music, and then I liked metal, and then I liked grunge.” Hough left Oklahoma to go to art school in Texas, and then came to Vegas for graduate school in 2001. He studied at UNLV under renowned art theorist Dave Hickey, during which time he met fellow artists David Ryan and Sean Slattery, also students of Hickey’s.
“We became fast friends,” Hough says. “There would be talk now and then of, ‘Hey, we should start a band,’ but no one really took it seriously, and so we never did.” Then came a certain night in fall 2005. “I actually showed up one night extremely nervous with my acoustic guitar and my poor pitch and my scrawled lyrics,” Hough recalls, “and I sang them two country songs I was working on.” The trio had been thinking about starting a business venture, and Hough’s proposal was that they collaborate on writing songs for the genre of music that he had once again come to embrace: mainstream country.
It was an unlikely project that the three artists took on with dedication and seriousness, meticulously studying popular songs on country radio and carefully crafting their own tunes for maximum accessibility. Ryan and Slattery weren’t country fans like Hough at first, but all three shared an interest in music that could reach a wide audience. “It wasn’t as easy at first for them to get into it,” Hough says, “but then we all became fans of it in our way. You become a fan of something, and that’s the most efficient way to learn about it.” They meet twice a week to work on songs and discuss strategy; their serious study has included activities like printing out the lyrics to the Top 10 country songs and analyzing what makes each one work.
In the summer of 2006, Hough contacted a friend in Nashville who arranged for professional studio musicians to record demos of three of the group’s songs. Hough, Ryan and Slattery traveled to Nashville themselves in October of last year, soaking up the vibe of the country-music capital. They mingled with performers and songwriters and got a taste of what life in Music City could be like. For Hough, the possibility of moving there is still very real, but the others are not so sure. “Sean was all for it until we went there,” Hough says, “and I think some of the social realities of the place, like the excess of Jesus talk, [put him off].”
For now, the group is focused on their artistic endeavors under the collective moniker Ripper Jordan. Their mission is still very much mainstream—they create inexpensive art pieces like T-shirts and buttons that they hope will appeal to a wide audience. All three also have pieces in the Las Vegas Diaspora show currently running at the Las Vegas Art Museum. The country songs are on the back burner, for now at least. “We realized it costs money to do this,” Hough says, “and we’ve gone into a business where you have to spend a lot of money, and making money doesn’t come as easily.” Still, he’s confident that when the right song comes along, they’ll do whatever it takes to get it in the hands of a singer who can do it justice. “There’s almost a feeling that, if we were to write the song—if one of us showed up one day with ‘All My Exes Live in Texas’—then I think the amazingness of the song would make us find a way to make it happen.”