A Little Bit Country, a Little Bit Hollywood BRITTANY HOYDICH

     Ray Bradbury once said, “You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.” No one knows this sentiment more than the beautiful and talented actress-turned-country-singer, Jana Kramer. For the brunette starlet, her music career has been one very successful leap of faith.

      Growing up in Michigan, Jana fell head over heels in love with the country music scene, listening to Detroit’s WYCD and singing whenever she could. When she wasn’t singing, she was writing. “I’ve been journaling since I was pretty much in elementary school,” she reveals. For her, the diaries she kept over the years have been a source of realization, a means of seeing just how much she has matured. One look at Jana rocking out on stage today and you would never know that she once doubted her talent.

     “I didn’t believe in myself enough to pursue the music, so I went into acting,” she tells me of the choice she made in her early teens. She feared the rejection, forcing her dreams of becoming a singer to take a backseat. Instead, she filled her career with spots on shows like “Entourage” and “Friday Night Lights”. Lucky for her, and us, it was her role as bad girl gone good, Alex Dupre, on “One Tree Hill” that finally launched her headfirst into the music scene. “When I was working on One Tree Hill, I gave some of my songs to the creator,” she tells me. “I was like, ‘Look, I don’t know if this is good or not. I don’t know if I have a good voice, but here’s some stuff that I’ve been working on in Nashville’.” Her risk paid off. The creator loved it and that moment changed everything for Jana as the show morphed into a platform for her to launch songs like “I Won’t Give Up” and “Whiskey.” Both tracks eventually found their way onto her self-titled album released in 2012. Now Jana is working on her sophomore album to be released later this year and if one thing is true, she is putting her heart out there for all to see. Her music is undeniably genuine, relatable and personal and she wouldn’t have it any other way. “I’ll never sing anything that I haven’t been through,” she says. Jana’s love of country music comes from the fact that it is a genre that revolves around storytelling and for her, she has a lot of stories to tell. “I’ve made a million mistakes, yet I love to love,” she tells me. “So it’s just one of those things you gotta write from the heart, because if not, then no one’s gonna believe you.”

     Her faith in love is so strong that “Love” is the title of her first single off of the new album. Written with her good friends Catt Gravitt and Jimmy Robbins, she tells me that the message of the single extends far beyond the idea of relationships. “It’s about the whole variety of what love stands for and helping other people and paying it forward,” she explains.