What Love Feels Like - Jenn Bostic
After another excellent gig last night at the Green Note, our featured artist today is the very talented and lovely US singer-songwriter Jenn Bostic. Jenn has just released a very infectious and catchy new single 'What Love Feels Like', which is our LCM #TrackOfTheDay. Jenn has a wonderful collection of music to discover (if you haven't already), including her latest album 'Faithful'. As of writing this article Jenn's new single has been B Playlisted by BBC Radio 2 which is a great and rare achievement for an independent artist.
Jenn Bostic’s career as a singer and songwriter began when she was 10 years old, in the back seat of her father’s car with her older brother on the way to school. A horrific crash that killed her dad, a hobby musician who taught her folk songs like “Sunny Side of the Street,” and turned her on to Emmylou Harris and Bonnie Raitt, changed the 25-year-old’s life forever.
“God must need another angel/Around the throne tonight,” she sings on “Jealous of the Angels,” a song on her second album, the follow-up to her very promising debut, 'Keep Lookin for Love'.
Born in Philadelphia, but raised in Waconia, Minnesota, a small town 30 miles west of Minneapolis, Jenn grew up singing with her family around the piano. Her father, a CEO of NordicTrack, played a variety of instruments, including accordion, while his daughter picked up a love of folk, blues, R&B, soul, show tunes and, eventually, country. Seeing her father die in front of her made her angry with God at first, but she later found an outlet for her sorrow in music and writing songs.
“The first time I was able to sit down at the piano and play, I shut my eyes and honestly felt a presence next to me,” she explains. “I poured my heart into those first few songs. The only way I could connect and be with my dad was when I played music. And I still feel that way.”
Jenn went on to perform wherever she could, taking voice, piano and acting lessons, singing in choirs and school musicals. She would sit in with a local roots band, Traveled Ground, that consisted of teachers from her middle and high school, and once included her father on accordion. She went east to attend the famed Berklee School of Music, where she honed her performance skills while studying music education, a field still vitally important to her.
“One day, I’d love to open up a ‘School of Rock’ type institution,” she says. “Just really give back by working with people who are as passionate as I am about music.” She also discovered country music, singing for a cover band called DiggerDawg, which opened for a variety of performers, including Alan Jackson, Josh Turner, Brad Paisley, Reba McEntire and Gretchen Wilson, as well as traveling to Iraq and Kuwait on an Armed Forces Entertainment Tour to entertain the U.S. troops.
On graduation, she relocated to Nashville, where she fell in with the local community, taking part in writers’ rounds and performing on a regular basis. “Change,” another song on the new album, expresses her frustration at being told she was “too pop for country and too country for pop.” “Everybody’s so quick with advice/About who I’m supposed to be,” she sings, stating defiantly, while quoting Judy Garland, “Never be a second-rate version of somebody else.”