At a ceremony in Atlanta on Aug. 5, local songwriter Roger Fournier received the Male Album of the Year Award from the International Singer-Songwriters Association (ISSA). His self-published album, “Nash 6,” by The Roger Fournier Project, took Gold, the top spot in his category.
“It is a real honor,” Fournier said. “It's kind of the largest platform for all indie artists out there in the world.
“They had 36 countries come over to this award show, so to win this competition, they have over 16,000 members, and then each nomination has 30 winners in each category, and then each category you can win a bronze, silver or gold award, kind of like the Olympics. So yes, it was an honor and I feel blessed just to be within this group of talent.”
Fournier, 57, has been playing music since he was a young teenager growing up in tiny Lyndonville, Vt. He got his start as a professional musician in the early 1980s playing in hair-metal bands, but by his mid-20s, Fournier had moved to Virginia Beach and began playing in a country band.
After meeting a woman in Macon, he married and settled down in Eatonton, where he continues to live while working for the same Watkinsville manufacturing company for the last 20 years.
Fournier lives with his 19-year-old daughter, who studies in the medical field at Georgia College and State University, in Milledgeville. He no longer performs live, beyond traveling to Nashville to occasionally participate in songwriter rounds.
“That’s just friends and songwriters. You get up there and you sing three or four of your songs and see what people think,” Fournier explained. “But when I pitch songs to Nashville, I use the Nashville artists, I mean players, musicians, and demo singers because you want to pitch the best you can make that song sound to Nashville.
“So that's not me. I'm a little older now, so I'm not looking for a record deal. I'm just looking to get my songs out there to an artist. I want to get my songs out there to the world.”
Fournier is hoping that winning the ISSA award will open some new doors to him.
“Nashville's a tough market, so I went to the indie market and it's just more family and friends, and your friends are going to be the ones that always love everything you do. They're never going to tell you if it's bad or good,” he said. “So that's why I liked the International Singer Songwriters Association. They evaluate it, they critique it, and they get it right. You know what I mean? Pros are doing this, so you’ve got to just kind of take it and go back to the rewrite drawing board and punch it out because you're competing against the whole world.
“And Nashville's tough. These people, they're doing writer's rounds, they’ve got their inner circles, they're networking there, so it's a lot tougher for a little old boy sitting in Eatonton, Georgia, to get a song cut. It’s such a hard market to get into, so I do feel really good about going up and winning the ISSA award with these songs that I wrote. So yeah, that was huge for me.”