Jake Shears

Jake Shears (born Jason F. Sellards; October 3, 1978) is an American singer, best known as the lead male singer for the pop band [a=Scissor Sisters] Born in Arizona, Shears is the son of an entrepreneur father and a Baptist mother. He grew up on San Juan Island. While living there, he attended school at Friday Harbor High School, where he was bullied. At the age of 18, he moved into a dorm at The Northwest School in Seattle to finish high school. Shears later attended Occidental College in Los Angeles. At the age of 19, he traveled to Lexington, Kentucky to visit a classmate, who introduced him to [a=Scott Hoffman (2)]. Shears and Hoffman hit it off immediately and they moved to New York a year later. In New York, Shears attended The New School's Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts, where he studied fiction writing and was classmates with Travis Jeppesen. He also wrote pieces for the gay magazine HX. Shears was a fixture on the New York gay and electroclash scene. In 2000, he worked as a music reviewer for Paper magazine. Shears and Hoffman formed Scissor Sisters in 2001 as a performance art stunt, playing outrageous shows in clubs like Luxx, the heart of the electroclash scene in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where Shears lived. After a couple years struggling in New York (working with record label A Touch of Class, who produced "Comfortably Numb" and "Filthy/Gorgeous"), Scissor Sisters finally found success in the United Kingdom and Ireland, ending 2004 with the biggest-selling album of the year in the UK. In concert, Shears is known for provocative dancing, flamboyant outfits, and near nudity. (During his early years while he was struggling to make it in New York, he would often earn extra money as a Go-go dancer and male erotic dancer at male strip clubs. Shears performed with Erasure's [a=Andy Bell] on "Thought It Was You", on Bell's 2005 album Electric Blue. He has also collaborated with [a=Tiga] on "Hot in Herre", "You Gonna Want Me", and "What You Need" from Tiga's album Ciao!. He also worked on Finnish house musician [a=Luomo]'s "If I Can't". Together with [a=Babydaddy], he co-wrote with [a=Kylie Minogue] on her hit single "I Believe in You" for her greatest hits compilation Ultimate Kylie. Shears and Minogue also co-wrote "Too Much" with [a=Calvin Harris] for Minogue's number one album Aphrodite. In 2011, Shears collaborated with John Garden to write the music for a musical version of the book Tales of the City.