Jake Soberlak: An Old Soul Finding His Voice in the Blues

There’s a moment in the history of the blues, somewhere between the Mississippi Delta of the 1920s and the electrified Chicago clubs of the 1950s, where the music stopped being just music and became something else. A language. One for longing, for resilience, for the full and complicated weight of being human. Most people spend decades trying to learn it. Jake Soberlak, at 17, already speaks it fluently.

Jake grew up in Kamloops, British Columbia, a city better known for its high desert landscape and hockey culture than for anything resembling a blues scene. Music ran in the family — his father is a musician who gave Jake his earliest lessons — but it was a chance discovery that changed the direction of things. Digging through a collection of his grandfather’s old records brought over from England, Jake found something that reached across generations and grabbed him. Those albums, scratchy, raw, utterly alive, lit afire that hasn’t gone out.

“It was through old records,” he says of how the blues found him. “Just listening, and then reading back and seeing who’s playing on this, and then they’re playing on another album…” He followed the threads the way great blues devotees always have. One name leading to another, one record to the next, building a self-education in a tradition more than a century deep. His favourites tell the story: B.B. King, Peter Green, Eric Clapton. Three players, each finding their own way into the same river.

Guitar at 13, harmonica at 14. Within a couple of years, word was moving through Kamloops that something unusual was happening. Longtime local musicians, people who’d spent their lives with this music, were paying attention. Here was a kid who wasn’t playing at the blues. He was playing it, with the feeling and authenticity the form demands.

When someone pointed out that this music was built from a lifetime of hardship and experience he hadn’t lived yet, Jake answered with the kind of clarity that’s hard to teach. “I don’t have as much experience, you know, like that, but not all blues songs are sad. It’s really a reflection of life. Happy and sad and everything in between. I like finding songs from the 30s, from the 40s or 50s, these gems that I really connect with. That’s really fun for me, and I enjoy giving them my own take once I’ve learned them.” There’s a humility in that, and a genuine understanding that the blues was never just about suffering. It’s about connecting to something real. Finding a song from 1938 and feeling it in your chest isn’t about pretending to have lived someone else’s life. It’s about knowing that human emotion doesn’t age out.

His debut album, recorded at Afterlife Studios in Vancouver, is where all of that understanding gets put on tape. Producer and drummer Leon Power, known for his work with City and Colour and Frazey Ford, assembled a serious band for the sessions: Darren Parris on bass, the acclaimed Darryl Havers on piano, with John Raham engineering. Every track was cut live off the floor. No overdubs. No fixes after the fact. Just four musicians in a room, playing together, getting it or not. Exactly the way those old records were made.

For a teenager cutting his first album alongside musicians with decades of professional experience, it would be easy to fold under the weight of it. Jake felt something else. “It was just such a good experience,” he says. “They’re all great people and great musicians, and it was so much fun. Two days in Vancouver, live off the floor.” The veterans treated him with real respect. They took his ideas seriously and gave him room. “I don’t think about it too much when I’m playing,” he says. Which is maybe the most telling thing a blues musician can say. The blues have never had much patience for overthinking.

On the record, Jake sings and plays guitar, slide guitar, and harmonica, the classic spine of the tradition. The slide work alone would raise eyebrows on a player twice his age. Slide guitar exposes you completely; there’s nowhere to hide in it. Jake plays it like someone with something to say.

He’s been building his live reputation in Kamloops and the surrounding area, one room at a time. His goals are uncomplicated. “I just want to be playing music and gigging. That’s all I want to do.” No hedging. No backup plan. Just the music.

Jake Soberlak’s debut album arrives September 11th, 2026. It’s the opening statement from a young man who found his grandfather’s records, heard something true in them, and decided to spend his life chasing that.

The blues have always found their messengers in unexpected places. It found one here.