Spotlight: Janna Jamison is Figuring it All Out and Confronting the Realities of Adulthood with “Treat Me Nice”
FINDING HER FOOTING IN A WORLD DEFINED BY CHANGE — Janna Jamison has been adapting to an ever-evolving world for the last few years. From moving to Nashville in order to cultivate her voice as a songwriter at Belmont University to finding her way through the disconcerting realities of young adulthood, Jamison has poured all of her confusion and ever-changing emotions into her debut EP, The Pulling My Clothes EP. Over the course of the EP, she explores themes of fighting for self-love, feeling lost and out of place, and ultimately finding hope in the rough times. Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Jamison has released the vintage-inspired music video for her single “Treat Me Nice.”
Moving to Nashville and to college itself wasn’t something that Jamison was thrilled about from the get-go. “College wasn’t something I particularly wanted for myself,” she says about leaving LA, where she grew up, for the country music capital.
While grateful to have the privilege to get a higher education, she still had a hard time reconciling the time spent in her science and English classes with the shows she would play at night, even as a songwriting major. “One of these felt more relevant than the other,” she says of balancing classwork with music. But there was one thing pushing her forward: wanting to make her mom proud has propelled her through her senior year.
Set to graduate this spring, Jamison did eventually find what was good in her new home. “It was probably the best thing that could have happened for my songwriting,” she says of moving to Nashville. “I feel like, even though LA is like the pop center, there is nothing more pop than the way that Nashville approaches writing.”
She valued the chance to see how Nashville maintains an old-school approach to artist development, working with new talent to build them from scratch, and she found exhilaration and influence in the Nashville band scene that she was immersed in through Belmont. “The house shows that are being put on by 18 and 19-year-olds playing to full crowds in their basement is some of the best live music you will ever see purely, because they're just doing it for fun.”
The move also influenced her songwriting by forcing Jamison into a new phase of life. “On a personal level, coming to Nashville changed my writing because I just got really sad,” she says. She describes being kept up at night by overwhelming feelings of being stuck. Even though the period was dark and frustrating, she says it “inspired a completely different type of writing, which was no longer just high school, teenage angst … now it was adult angst.” Freshman year of college is always a hard and pivotal time, trying to figure out how to be an adult without any kind of guidebook, and it proved to be inspiring for Jamison.
Despite this rough introduction to Nashville, Jamison dove headfirst into writing for herself, as well as venturing into co-writing. While she begins all the songs for her artist project alone, she loves helping other artists tell their stories. “I love writing with other artists because … if you're writing for an artist, there are still details that you can add in and direction that they have specifically,” she explains. “You're helping somebody's whole being sort of come to life a little bit.”
Her first solo project, The Pulling My Clothes EP, came to life across Jamison’s entire college career, starting with the moment she released her first double-sided single, “White Guys That Play Jazz.” The release made her consider a music career more seriously. “I wanted to actually try to do the damn thing,” she says with a laugh, reflecting on that moment. It was her childhood best friend, Kate, who conveniently went into the music industry, who helped her shape her artistic direction and brainstorm what the EP would look like.
The first idea session ended in a much smaller scale vision than what came to be in the final project. “So at first, the EP started out as, ‘Let's just do a really simple stripped[-down thing], like Phoebe Bridgers’ first EP,” she explains. They agreed that an acoustic EP would highlight Jamison’s exquisite songwriting skills. But then the direction started to change.
“The songs just started getting bigger and bigger, and I was really inspired by the Nashville band scene,” she elaborates. “It just started to grow into this monster that neither of us really intended for it to be.” Not going for the full production felt like selling the songs short, so Jamison enlisted another childhood friend, Huston Haro, to lead the production evolution of the project.
With the songs finally coming together, the EP was set to release in the summer of 2020, but with the onset of the pandemic, they decided to hold off until Jamison could play shows to support the project. In the meantime, she kept writing, adding “You Never Do” and “Naked” to the tracklist. “We ended up switching around the whole EP,” she says of the year between the planned release and its actual emergence into the world.
At the end of the story, Jamison smirks and says, “Sorry to make a long story even longer.” In the end, the process taught her about the importance of collaboration and community in the creative process.
“Treat Me Nice” is the latest single to come off The Pulling My Clothes EP, alongside a new music video set for Valentine’s Day. Talking about the song’s lyrics, in which Jamison convinces herself to go to therapy, she admits that she still hasn’t gone, even though she thinks about it often.
Though the song offered a sense of catharsis, Jamison explains that she felt like the song almost gave her a pass on actually finding a therapist. “It makes me feel like being aware of the problem is enough,” she says. “Which is just not the case. It’s just me being delusional, really, because having self awareness is a great thing, but it doesn’t mean anything if you’re not going to actually take action or help yourself. It definitely makes me feel like a hypocrite.”
“Treat Me Nice” is unique in the pop world for being about her relationship with herself, rather than with a love interest. It’s something that Jamison is proud of all across her debut project. “I really wanted to make a point of having a majority of the songs on the EP not be about romantic love, because I feel it showcases me as a songwriter,” she says. The themes of the record revolve around “feeling depressed and out of place, and feeling like giving up.”
While those realities were hyper-present in her life at the time of writing the EP, it pushed Jamison out of her usual comfort zone of writing about love. “It does produce some of my best work,” she admits of the challenge.
As for what’s next, Jamison is mostly focused on playing her newly released songs for live audiences. Catch her playing around Nashville for the next few months before she moves back to LA to continue growing her pop career. “I feel so much more fulfilled playing a show in front of 10, 20, 30 people than I do getting hundreds of likes or listens. When I'm performing in front of a real person who after the show is telling me that a lyric or a song really spoke to them or it made them cry…” Jamison trails off as she gets momentarily transported to being back on stage. For those not in Nashville or LA, she is in the studio working on new music. It’s just a while away as of now.
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