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| Jessica Andrews Direct | media > articles |
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Jessica Andrews: Her Time is Now Neil Haislop April 2003 Jessica Andrews dropped out of sight a little over a year and a half ago to work on a new album, and to establish her own space as a grown up human being. And like a beautiful, musical caterpillar, with a recording studio and her own home for cocoon space, she underwent a marvelous metamorphosis, emerging in November changed from "teen" sensation, to gorgeous, adult songstress, filled with confidence in her first grown-up album, glowing from the blush of her first grown-up love, and with a look that's as on-fire as both her professional and personal lives. There's no doubt that Jessica Andrews' time is NOW! "Now" (the title song of her new album) basically says where I am at in my life. I waited a long time to experience love and it's everything that I thought it would be and more. And I thought it was the perfect title for the album. There are a lot of new changes in my life and this is me, now. This is the new me," Jessica declares passionately. Some of those changes are reflected in new songs on the album, including the first single, "There's More To Me Than You," co-written with her first serious, adult love interest, Marcel, and a writer named James T. Slater. WAS THERE EVER AN "OLD ME"? While Jessica declares the "new me," I guess she refers to the 6 years from the time she was discovered by Byron Gallimore at age 12, to age 18, as the "old years." But, since all things are relative, Jessica says she is more than happy to see her years as a "teen sensation" slip away, even though she's proud of what she accomplished while embracing the new changes in her life and career. "Oh everything has changed. In the last year I've kind of been out of the limelight, for the last year and a half really, making a record. There have been a lot of new changes in my life, a lot of changes personally and musically," she affirms. "And so, with this album, I felt like I had to take that space away from the limelight a little bit and take that time and refocus on what direction, where do I want to go. I've had two albums out already by the time I was 18, you know. So, where do I want to go this time? This was a big decision for me to decide to be away and really focus on the album, I needed it." She had time to contemplate how far she had come and what she had accomplished since she launched her debut album HEART SHAPED WORLD, in 1999 when she was just 15 years old. She didn't break through until 2001 when she scored her first #1 single with, "Who I Am," garnering enough attention as a viable new artist to win Top New Female Vocalist from the Academy of Country music. That helped put her in demand as an opener for artists like Tim McGraw, Faith Hill and Trisha Yearwood. She ended the "early" phase of her career with an amazingly successful, co-headlining tour with Billy Gilman, only to find it a little tough to get over the teen sensation image. "I think it's just been tough to get out of the thing, the teen thing, it's been tough and it's getting better all the time with this record," she says. "And I hope, I don't think people are going to be thinking about age on this one. I think they're going to be thinking 'wow, this is great music!' I hope so, 'great writer'�So, yeah, it's been tough for me to be able to grow up and be a teenager in this business. You obviously get tarred with the brush of being a teenage singer for a long time." MOVING OUT ON HER OWN A REALITY CHECK The first big step to breaking her former "teen" image and to establishing grown-up independence, is leaving the comfort and convenience of your parents' home. It was a real dose of reality for Jessica. "When I moved out on my own I stopped eating," says Jessica with mock horror. "I think altogether I was like, 'Whoa! I don't have anybody to cook for me anymore.' I think when you move out on your own you're discovering a lot of things. You've got your own place and you're learning how to do laundry and cooking and everything's a new experience. So, it's not like when I was living at home and had dinner ready for me every night. So, it was different, definitely," she correctly concludes. It was also exciting, because she was also free to find her way to real romantic love and did just that when she was introduced to a promising up-and-coming Nashville singer-songwriter who goes by the simple name, Marcel. SOULMATE AND CO-WRITER IN THE SAME PACKAGE Finding Marcel was serendipitous for Jessica, who felt twice blessed to find a lover with whom she could also share her love of creating music. "Well, Marcel and I met through my producer's wife, Missy Gallimore, actually," Andrews explains. "We hit it off from the beginning, professionally and personally, we're best friends and we're each other's biggest fans. We have a unique relationship. It's amazing." The relationship was also productive, providing the all-important first single from the new album, NOW. "The single, "There's More To Me Than You," was actually written at the very end of this album�very end of recording everything," Jessica recalls. "It felt like all the pieces of the puzzle were fitting nicely, all the songs were coming together, we spent a year looking for these songs, writing songs, but there was still a piece missing. It didn't feel like we had that right single yet." "So, we were still trying to write songs and we were actually getting ready to record the last session on the record and the night before, actually the day before, Marcel, who is my co-writer on this song, came to me a few days earlier with this idea, this melodic idea and the chorus�(oo-oo-oooh, oo-oo-ooh) and he had that little hooky "ooo" you know, and so we wrote it the day before that last recording session, not ever thinking we would write the first single. I just wanted to write that day but could not believe what we were getting that day. I was like, 'this is going to be it, this is what we're going to cut, I just had a gut feeling about it.' JESSICA RECORDS PERFECT TRANSITION ALBUM What any former teen sensation needs is to make a transition from teenage to young adult with a credible album of more mature material. The first evidence of Jessica accomplishing that is the single, "There's More To Me Than You." It's also there in a record written because the young lovers couldn't stand to be apart. "You're the Man That Brings the Woman out of Me" is a song Marcel wrote about me actually, Marcel and James (Slater) wrote it," she relates. He wrote this song about me during the time I was out with Tim McGraw this past June, and I was out for a couple of weeks. It was the first time that we had been away from each other. He actually wrote it from his perspective, 'you're the woman that brings the man out of me.' And he called me up and played it for me over the phone and I was, 'Oh, I want to go home!' It was really sweet. "When I got home I would hear him sing it a lot and I would sing it, you know, turning it around 'you're the man that brings the woman out of me,' and it worked great. So, we both got a song out of the time we were being lonely and we got a song out of it about how we felt." JESSICA'S TIME IS CERTAINLY, NOW When you listen to Jessica Andrews' powerful new album full of love songs that she's written with the man in her life, and other wonderful tunes like "They Are The Roses," a wonderful plea for children to be able to grow up innocent, not exposed to horrible things in life too young, you realize that Jessica has her life and career together to a degree far beyond her 19 years. You can see it below the surface through her music and on the surface through her sophisticated new look. She's lost the roundness of her shape by growing into a more "womanly" figure. "I think I've just come naturally into my own form. I look back and I was so young, 15 and 16, and it's just so funny to grow up and be in the middle of all of it and see photos of how much you look different and the changes. At least hairstyles haven't been that dramatic for me yet. But I look back at some photos of other artists and go, 'Wow!'" Jessica is happy with her new shorter hairdo, but confesses it's been a coiffure of many colors. "Yes, I have naturally dark hair. I'm a typical girl when it comes to hair. It got really, really, blond and it got brown and red, sort of reddish tinted. But, I have had this past year off so I've kind of experimented and gosh, I went really, really blond because I went to Hawaii. Then when I started finishing this album it was in November that I decided to go back to my natural color and cut my hair off and that was a big decision but I was really excited about it." Finally, Jessica Andrews has a lot to be excited about. She's made an amazing transition from promising teenager, to sophisticated and experienced singer, songwriter and stage performer. In the process she's found love and her adult voice as a writer and singer, all evident in her new album NOW. And, it's happening because Jessica is a performer who has known what she wants in life since she was a small child entering and winning talent contests, one who feels she's just at the beginning of a long career. "You know I've always been in it for the longevity, I'm serious about my career and everything. I want to be in it for the long run, 10 years from now, and to be a big star right now. And if it takes these steps and these steps each year to make it better and better�if it takes that, then it's fine with me. If each record is more defining for me as an artist," she sums up brilliantly. |
