Jessie Murph's angsty, heartbroken, soulful, country-pop vibes excite Marathon Music Works

18-year-old pop vocalist Jessie Murph is younger than trap music -- but as a child fostered by its inspirations, is wholly inspired by its aesthetics, sounds and style.

Singing and songwriting for roughly a decade after learning to walk, her 20-song headlining set at Nashville's Marathon Music Works also proved that the next significant lesson she's had in her life is that heartbreak can be learned as muscle memory.

Bass groove-aided soul crooner Henry Verus opened.

Socioeconomics and pie-in-the-sky dreams make the 100 miles between Murph's hometown of Athens, Alabama and Nashville, Tennessee, feel like the suburbs and city of the same aspirational hometown area.

Her post-pandemic success of expanding from an artist only known on TikTok to having half as many monthly Spotify listeners as Dan + Shay and a quarter as many listeners as Morgan Wallen has quickly put her on the same tracks and stages as Diplo, Jelly Roll and Maren Morris.

She's also 18, so when she's singing about drinking and drugs while using the same rap-sing cadence as Drake, Future, or any one of many Southern or Southern-inspired rappers in the past decade, she's tapping into the same type of illicit, yet aspirational lifestyle anthems that have governed pop music since the beginning of time.

She's also quick to belt out Amy Winehouse's "Back To Black," Destiny's Child's "Say My Name" and Adele's "Somebody Like You," plus quick to name many bitterly lovelorn vocalists and their anthems as massive inspirations. In interviews, she's also added performers like Rihanna to that list.

Cuts like "How Could You," "Always Been You" and crowd-rousing anthem "About You" (Every shi**y thing you do /Gonna do it right back to you / You're probably finna hate me too / But f***, that's what I love about you) play directly into her soulful pop to hip-hop inspirations.

However, she was also raised by a musically inclined single mother and both she and her brother can play the guitar and ukelele.

Dig deeper into the catalog of music she presented at Marathon Music Works and clear country music-style inspirations exist. The unreleased song "Wildflowers and Wine" sounds like Deana Carter's 1996-released classic "Strawberry Wine" but is instead an acoustic ode to her mother, strummed by her brother Garrett, with a chorus hoping that one day, her mother has a suitor who brings her "wildflowers and wine."

It's not entirely giving her her roses, but it did bring her tear-jerked mother onstage for a loud ovation.

Songs like "Cowboys and Angels" and "Texas" are more in her lane, though.

Both ballads feel like the space between Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift, with the clear inspiration of 25 years of Atlanta's hip-hop cadences and swagger as direct inspiration.

For instance, the same Marathon Music Works crowd that could sing along loudly to every word of Swift's "I Knew You Were Trouble" knew Murph's verse in the Morris collaboration "Texas (You came in like a one-person show / Outta town, had a couple years, only knew s**t I didn't know / And it felt so real that I couldn't let go / While you ran me around like a motherf***ing rodeo)."

One thing is for certain. In modern music, the lyrics assuredly matter -- likely moreso than now-flimsy genre delineations.

A third-person relationship to heartbreak but a first-person relationship to anger governs Murph's music overall.

This exists simply because, due to age, the depth and scope required to flesh out nuanced emotional responses is not a consistent part of her life or emotional processing.

To wit, she returned to the stage for an encore and delivered "Upgrade," one of her pandemic-era breakout tracks.

"Upgrade" is one of many songs that, according to the vocalist in a 2021 Flaunt interview, caused her Bible Belt roots to clash with gender-driven social norms remaining intact in the modern era. Once her success began to expand, her fame being associated with her hometown was deemed "unacceptable" and caused her to form a "chip on her shoulder."

"I could see dudes doing it, but I couldn't do it? That [s*** pissed] me off! So unfair. "

When she dives into the meat of the performance's lyrical content, verses flow like digital-ready, viral success-aimed anthems of the present day.

"Oh my God, I can't believe you fell for a fake / I know that b***h, she's on my d***, been tryna take my place / One step in my stilettos, she gon' fall right on her face / Hope, she like the dirt 'cause she been diggin' her own grave."

Reflect and contemplate the space between Amy Winehouse and Adele's catalog, the flash ahead to Rihanna's last two albums and Gunna's current Billboard-successful material.

Then realize that you're currently in Nashville and country's latest generation of outlaws turned pop stars are wearing cowboy hats and Nike sneakers while chasing after girls on Broadway wearing the same knee-high white cowboy boots and rhinestone fringe on every third young woman in attendance at Murph's concert.

As much as art imitates life, life also imitates art.

More often than not, these are lives where heartbreak -- as much as talking and walking -- are early-learned muscle memories with bittersweet, long-lasting impacts.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Jessie Murph's angsty, heartbroken, soulful, country-pop vibes excite Marathon Music Works