Editor’s note: Jordana Bryant is a singer / songwriter who’s making waves in the world of contemporary country music. Pasadena singer / songwriter / guitarist Emma Terzyan is an 8th grader at Sierra Madre Middle School. The two guitar-pickin’ Swifities recently dished inspo and the music biz over lunch.
Jordana Bryant is a 19-year-old singer / songwriter with a Nashville flair. She recently visited Los Angeles from Nashville to shoot a music video, perform at a concert and attend a songwriting session.
We met up at Dialog Café in WeHo to discuss her life in the industry and what she’s doing next with her music.
Bryant began posting on YouTube when she was 14, and in February 2020 caught the attention of a producer in Nashville who saw one of her videos and invited her to Tennessee to record a few songs. That’s where she met her now-manager, who introduced her to his publisher who then arranged co-writing Zoom sessions with other songwriters.
Her song “New Friends” was a big breakthrough for the young artist. This was the first song she saw take off, with 80 million plays on Instagram and TikTok.
Another Bryant hit, “Miles Don’t Matter,” has exceeded one million streams across social media. Regarding the lyrics, Bryant says, “I feel like long-distance friendships are kind of a niche topic, but they’re something a lot of us experience, especially once you move, or go to college, or your friends go to college and you’re in different places.”
Her music’s also been featured on the Country Music Awards and heard on SiriusXM’s “The Highway.” Bryant has been featured in Billboard, People, Glamour, UpnCountry, Taste of Country, Country with Celine, and many other entertainment publications.
Bryant opened for the band “Girl Named Tom” that won NBC’s Season 21 of The Voice, touring with the group in December. She comments, “It was so fun getting to open for them, I feel like they’re very unique in the harmonies that they do.”
Originally from small-town Pennsylvania, Bryant started learning guitar at age 10, and began traveling with her rock musician dad to Tennessee when she as 15. Since Pennsylvania didn’t have a large music scene, and she couldn’t perform in that many shows because of her age, traveling to Tennessee was full of exposure to the world of alt-country and Americana.
She’s always loved singing and songwriting, and enjoys listening to singers like Taylor Swift, Adele, and Ed Sheeran.
The artist started exploring co-writing when she was 15. She says, “I think there’s no other better way to grow as a songwriter than co-writing, ‘cause when you’re in the room with other songwriters, you can pick up on things that they do.”
She says her biggest challenge is staying true to herself because, she explains, when you get into an industry with so many people giving you advice, “… it can be easy to chase what someone else is doing instead of focusing on your own dreams.”
Bryant adds, “I think that focusing on ‘Does this feel authentic to me?,’ you know, do that, and if it does feel authentic to me, even if someone says that’s not gonna work, I just have to trust myself and follow that path.”
She says that as an artist, she does things when she feels the time is right, adding that “You don’t need to rush anything.” To stay on track, she sets both short-term and long-term goals for herself, working from a daily, weekly and even yearly timeline.
A favorite among her own compositions is “When God Closes Doors” because, “I’ve always cared about putting that message to it, and it has a life-lesson, and my favorite songs have always had a life-lesson in them, and so I love opportunities to put that in my music and also when I get to talk about my faith.”
The day I met with Bryant, she performed at KTLA in the morning, singing “Remembering It Wrong,” accompanying herself on the acoustic guitar, her instrument of choice.
