But Clemons is also forging his own musical path: on his downtime from the E Street Band, he began work on his debut EP, Embracing Light, released earlier this month. The singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist tells Radio.com that he started working on his own music in 2010, but had to put his own project on hold when E Street came calling.

"Picking up again with my band this year was really exciting, we hadn't been together for two years," Clemons said. "I had been recording songs in hotels all over the world and sending them back to the guys in the states."

Despite being the nephew of a legend, his career in rock and roll was far from a guaranteed thing. Though Clarence was a legend, Jake's musician father actually frowned on rock music in a big way.

"My father, being in the Marine Corp Band, so I was into [marching] band music," he explained. "John Philip Sousa, that was my first introduction to music. Classical music was what we'd listen to in the car a lot, and then gospel — Shirley Caesar and Andraé Crouch. We weren't allowed to listen to rock and roll. I was taught as a young person that it was noise, and it was bad. My first experience with rock and roll was [going to see the] E Street. Seeing that as an 8-year-old, it blew my mind, I remember it being really loud, I had never been exposed to distorted guitars before. The communal experience of it was what really blew my mind. That's what stuck with me."

A few years later came another revelation, courtesy of another family member. "He [my brother] is seven years older than me, and I was in his car and he was blasting [Nirvana's] Nevermind over and over again, and I decided that I needed to find some value in this," Clemons explained. "And I found that thing, and by the time I got out of the car, I was in love with that record. Hearing Kurt Cobain sing was the realest thing you could hear. That just opened up my world completely. Even my understanding of how to enjoy music, I would go out of my way to find things that I didn't love initially, because people like it! Somebody likes it! What is it that they're really finding? The '90s, for sure, was a really big influence on me. It was my first love for rock music."

But it was another vocalist who convinced Clemons that he, too, could get on the mic. "I didn't become a singer until I heard Glen Hansard in the movie Once," he said. "That blew my mind. Glen Hansard has an amazing voice, it's an expression of: 'I'm going to be vulnerable and honest and this is real.' That's also what stuck with me about Kurt Cobain."

In a bit of cosmic coincidence, it was one of Cobain's bandmates who gave Jake the encouragement he needed to stick with songwriting. Shortly after he began writing songs, singing and playing guitar, he was performing some of his originals at a wedding that Dave Grohl happened to be attending. "He heard me play a few of my songs, and came and approached me afterwards and said, 'You're a great songwriter.' That changed my whole world."

As if his personal rock history could go more full circle, it was yet another Seattle legend — alongside Hansard — that helped Clemons get through his darkest hour.