Alana Springsteen Calls Herself a Romantic — but It's Heartbreak That Drives Her on New EP
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Alana Springsteen grew up singing in her granddad's church, a little girl who started playing the guitar at 7 years old and found that the melodies that came from it could somewhat soothe her young heart. And at 10 years old, after filling that young heart with the sounds of artists such as Carrie Underwood and Keith Urban, Springsteen took her first trip to Nashville and wrote her very first song.
"From an early age, I just felt like being a country music artist was what I was put on this earth to do," Springsteen, 20, tells PEOPLE. "Songwriting has always been my passion."
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Soon, the Springsteen family found themselves packing up and moving from Virginia Beach to Music City, which immediately wrapped its arms around the budding talent. At 14 years old, Springsteen was offered her first publishing deal, and has been writing ever since.
That's how she got here. But that's just part of the story.
Anna Clary Alana Springsteen
History of Breaking Up (Part One) serves as Springsteen's most important and most anticipated project of her still-young career, a magical mixture of deep thoughts on love and heartbreak, all delivered by a voice that seems to represent the future of country music.
"I call myself a romantic because I'm one of those people that think just about everything can be beautiful," explains Springsteen, who recently shared the news on Instagram that she will be going out on tour with Los Angeles-based pop band LANY. "I love all the nuances of emotions. I think it's all just part of our journey and gets us where we're meant to be."
Discovering her own journey certainly drove the creation of History of Breaking Up (Part One), as Springsteen is the first to admit that many writing sessions warped into therapy sessions for her and anyone else lucky enough to be in the room. And with this project, she hopes that her journey and that therapy that she craved now helps others.
"I just hope it makes people feel a little bit less alone, because we all go through the same emotions," she says of the entirety of the ultra-truthful tracklist that she serves as co-writer on. "It's such a cool thing to be able to connect with each other through music and find pieces of our collective truths in a song somebody else wrote."
Anna Clary Alana Springsteen
From "God Must Be Mad at Me" to "California" to "I Blame You," Springsteen certainly leads with her truth.
"I think the more honest and vulnerable you can be, and almost the more specific you can be, somehow that all makes everything more relatable to the listener," says Springsteen. "Songs don't always need some crazy flowery lyric. You just need to write the way you feel in that moment."
And not everything had to be heavy.
"We probably laughed more than we wrote," Springsteen says of "Zero Trucks," a song that materialized during a Zoom co-write with "Fancy Like" creator Walker Hayes. "It was our first write together and it was a title that he actually brought in. If you know Walker, he's so good with the puns! The second I heard the title, I knew we had to write it."
But perhaps the shining moment on the entire project is "Homesick," a sonic gem of a song that oozes with freshness and forward-type thinking, while also sounding both raw and organic.
"So many sounds live within that one song," she says. "And each and every sound adds to that kind of unsettled feeling that the song is about."
And as a new artist, Springsteen isn't immune to that unsettled feeling. But when it comes up, she turns to the backbone that is her faith.
"I do feel like we're all meant to do something and there's so much purpose in it and there's no coincidences," she says. "I can look back on my journey and just see all the doors God's opened — all the things that don't make sense and that shouldn't have happened actually ended up leading me to exactly where I am. And that's a beautiful thing."
