Country-crossover star Jessie Murph's debut album offers raw wisdom beyond her years
Jessie Murph is a superstar on the rise, age 19 going on 99.
She's the kind of artist performing the type of music where, if you blink three times, you'll miss the moments before she accepts trophies on award stages worldwide.
Blink once and you've missed that she's already sold 5 million singles (including Jelly Roll collaboration "Wild Ones") since she could legally drive.
Blink twice and you've missed that she's already paired on tracks not just with Jelly Roll, but also Diplo, Maren Morris, Teddy Swims, Koe Wetzel and Bailey Zimmerman.
Blink again and she has released her debut album, "That Ain't No Man That's the Devil," on Sept. 6 via Columbia Records.
'That Ain't No Man That's the Devil'
"I'm intentionally making timeless music that could've been great 50 years ago and will be great 50 years from now," the teenager says in an interview with The Tennessean.
Hit play on Murph's debut album and an orchestra of sounds familiar to the era when Amy Winehouse was recording with the Dap-Kings on her 2006-released, Grammy-winning album "Back to Black" occupy the same space as Murph's cracking, smoky, Huntsville-honed voice on "Gotta Hold."
The track's producer, Jeff Gitelman, says Murph's style is best aided by blending the "imperfect character and vibe" of '60s- and '70s-era analog sounds that have historically appeared on R&B and country pop-crossover hits with the rougher edge of '90s- and 2000s-era New York and Atlanta hip-hop beats.
"Surrounding myself with insanely musical creatives with multi-instrumental knowledge (like Gitelman) keeps me inspired," says Murph.
'Amy Fisher and I are related'
Few songs are as "raw and authentic" on her new album as "Bang Bang (The Ballad of Amy Fisher)."
For those unaware, in 1992, 17-year-old Long Island, New York, resident Fisher shot and wounded Mary Jo Buttafuoco, the wife of Joey Buttafuoco. He had been in a relationship with Fisher since she was 15. Initially charged with first-degree attempted murder, she eventually pleaded guilty to first-degree aggravated assault and served seven years in prison. Due to her age and her affair, she became known as "the Long Island Lolita."
"Through my grandfather, Amy Fisher and I are related," Murph says.
She was in the studio, and the storyline of a track told from Fisher's perspective of her wild teenage life was presented to her by its co-writer, Grammy nominee (and the co-writer of Maren Morris' 2020 hit "The Bones") Laura Veltz.
"I had to stop Laura because it sounded vaguely familiar to one of my old family stories," Murph says. "I went home, called around, then talked to my mom. When I returned to the studio the next day, I knew I had to (record the song)."
A lesson she learned before recording that song, which informs the qualities of its styling on record, is summarized in a brutally delivered and candid statement:
"The definition of love is loyalty."
'Someone in This Room'
Stories that feel too wild to be accurate run throughout Murph's 19 years.
A musically inclined single mother raised her; she and her brother can play the guitar and ukulele. Draw a line between Dolly Parton's "Jolene" to Deana Carter's "Strawberry Wine," Taylor Swift's "I Knew You Were Trouble" and Morris' "My Church" and you find drips and snippets of inspiration.
That life has, more often than not, seen protecting herself from or parsing through the rubble of traumatic heartbreak as her earliest and most bittersweetly learned muscle memory.
"I can't write songs I haven't felt or seen in my life," Murph notes.
"Having singing and songwriting as an outlet allows me, while the feelings are more prevalent than they'll ever be, to immediately capture those emotions."
Of her album's material, the Zimmerman collaboration "Someone in This Room" (about "being in a relationship that's so bad that you don't know who's to blame anymore") feels as though it benefits most from this creative process.
The song is an amalgam of moments surrounding "generations (messed up) love" — her own, her divorced parents and others included — that she's endured.
"Young people are processing so many things that no other (previous) generation has ever (had to endure). I'm glad to talk about things that other (generations) have ever had to survive (or discuss)."
Rap influences
Murph is younger than trap-styled rap music's existence as a genre. However, she was a child fostered as much by her mother's love as by trap's inspirations, aesthetics, sounds and style.
She's been a rap fanatic since middle school, which occurred so recently in her life that her rap fandom falls somewhere between Lil Baby releasing "Freestyle" in November 2017 and Drake releasing "Nice for What" six months later.
"The storytelling and motivational vibes that inspire so much country music also have created so many hip-hop songs," Murph adds.
"We also all are what we listen to," she says. "For my generation, breaking free of being surrounded by our anxieties and insecurities is like taking off a mask that we're using to protect ourselves from the world. My music allows people to feel comfortable in their vulnerability."
'Maybe they shouldn't be here'
"Sometimes, when I'm singing onstage, I'll look out in the crowd and see a 13-year-old singing back at me — that still stuns me. Like, maybe they shouldn't be here," says Murph, laughing.
She was 12 years old and listening to Lil Baby rap about giving $5 million in $100 bills to a drug dealer.
She's now having self-referential moments that cast her life — and the life into which she's been thrust — into a different perspective.
"Regardless of what that looks like, or how drained it makes me feel sometimes after a live performance, people deserve to be seen," she says. "Having a space for an emotional release (concerning) the anger and hurt we're all currently feeling is important.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Nashville star Jessie Murph drops debut album with Columbia Records
