Country singer Jackie Lee found his own sound with ‘Getting Over You’

When something doesn’t feel right, it’s usually because it isn’t.

Country singer Jackie Lee had the creeping suspicion that the musical road he was on was the wrong one, but, because of the success of the people he was working with, he didn’t feel as if he had the right to speak up.

“Though I didn’t know what I wanted necessarily, I definitely knew that what I was doing was not right,” he said.

After six years of doing what he was told, Lee had a light bulb moment with his latest single “Getting Over You,” which brings him to the Knitting Factory on Sunday.

“It hit all the personal check marks in my own mind of what I needed to be the artist that I wanted to be,” Lee said. “When we finished that song, I knew it was something special for me.”

“Getting Over You” is an emotionally charged tune that finds Lee comparing notes with an ex after a breakup (“Bet you never taste my kiss in a rum and coke,” “You’re moving on/And I can barely move,”).

Lee sums up how the pain he’s feeling with the song’s hook: “If you think getting over me was hard, try getting over you.”

The country influences are still there – Lee is a born and bred Tennessean, after all – but the song is heavy on melody and is a tune he connects with emotionally.

“All of that together, I just knew that I wanted that to be my brand,” he said.

Helping Lee develop this brand is Paul DiGiovanni, guitarist in pop-rock band Boys Like Girls, a fact Lee, who listened to all of the band’s albums while in high school, didn’t realize until after he had written with DiGiovanni several times.

The realization came a few months after Lee, who was in the early stages of trying to find his sound, rediscovered the band after a friend suggested he look to music he loved growing up for inspiration.

“I was on an airplane and … I listened to the (Boys Like Girls) record the whole way through twice,” Lee said. “I was like ‘I want so much of these sounds.’ ”

Cut to four months later, when Lee is writing with a musician named Paul. While getting a cup of coffee, Lee sees a Boys Like Girls double-platinum album leaning against the wall in the kitchen.

“I was like ‘Hey man, why do you have this?’ ” Lee said. “He was like ‘Oh, that’s my band.’ I spilled coffee everywhere because I was freaking out that the Paul I was writing with was Paul DiGiovanni from Boys Like Girls.”

In his defense, Lee said DiGiovanni looks completely different from his early Boys Like Girls days.

This serendipitous meeting led to more writing sessions. Lee calls DiGiovanni the nicest person he’s met in the music industry and credits him for a boost in productivity.

“We wrote several times before we wrote ‘Getting Over You,’ and every time we wrote, I felt like we were getting closer and closer and closer to what I was supposed to be doing with my career,” he said.

Now that he’s finally on the right path, Lee plans to hit the ground running, with performances at festivals including Stagecoach and Watershed, which comes to the Gorge July 28-30, and radio shows lined up later this year.

“I want to hardly be in Nashville because I do feel like the last six years have been dedicated in Nashville, just getting it right,” he said. “Now I’m ready to work really hard.”