Jamie Lynn Hart is on a roll. She just released her CD Anticipate, and she’s gearing up for a tour of the northeast to promote it. Local reviewers have been praising Anticipate, and that should come as no surprise to those who have seen Hart during her five years on the scene.
Hart has been singing professionally for ten years. For five years before entering the highly competitive Boston music scene, Hart was using her undergraduate and graduate school training in classical and opera to make her living. She still sings professionally at churches, but that is not her life any more. “I had to make a big decision when I graduated with my master’s at BU,” Hart said. “I can either continue with this and really go all out operatically, or I can follow my heart and do something like I’m doing.”
Hart’s graduate degree is in vocal performance, giving her serious training. Yet, that training is vastly different from the kind of singing she does now. “I had to relearn a lot of techniques for pop singing because classical singing technique is so different.” She had to change from “head voice” to “chest voice” but she still relies on the old training for breathing techniques. “It makes me a healthy singer and most importantly, it makes me a really good teacher as well,” she said.
Hart has been active in the Boston-Cambridge-Somerville nightclub circuit but her tour next February will bring her to Vermont, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Washington D.C. Her tour has been booked by Fleming Entertainment and Hart will be sharing stages with Connecticut soul-blues guitarist-vocalist Frank Biele. Hart’s manager John Fleming heard Hart on The Cheap Seats radio show on Cape Cod. “It’s a local show on Sunday nights, and I co-hosted it,” she said. “He was listening, and he said ‘Wow, these songs are really marketable. I could really work with those.’”
Hart’s goal was to maintain musical and lyrical integrity and she never wanted to sell out, but she certainly appreciates a strong hook. Hart released two E.P.s in the past four years, but her debut full length Anticipate is a collection of who she is now.
Hart got so involved with the recording project that she didn’t really stop and think about it until the new CDs showed up on her doorstep. “These last two month’s I’ve been on cloud nine with it,” she said, “because the response has been really wonderful. It’s been a really good experience. I feel like a big chunk of life’s goal has been checked off the list.”
Hart wrote all of the songs on her new debut CD. “Bound To Burn” was inspired by a friend of Hart’s who had a tendency to involve herself in everybody’s personal things and completely disregard people’s feelings in selfish moves. The song says when it happens to you, you’re going to be shocked. “It ends up happening to her,” Hart said. “If you keep playing with fire you’re going to get burned, but you do it regardless.”
“Freedom Song” is her political song. She wrote it the day she found out President George W. Bush had been re-elected. “I was just dumbfounded,” she said. “I was never so surprised and upset by anything political. I usually stay away from that, but that just pushed me over the edge. It really bothers me when people take a totally ambivalent view of voting when it comes to presidential elections, especially in Mass., cause people always say ’I’m not even going to bother voting because it’s a blue state anyway.’ That’s fine, but we’re so lucky we have an opportunity to have a say in this, and people don’t even give a shit, and then they’re the ones who complain when something bad happens. That’s crazy.”
Her song “In too Deep” is a generic relationship song in which the person is not sure how far to go with a relationship. “Sometimes you don’t really know you’re boundaries,” she said. “Sometimes it’s really clear, like this person is totally into me and I have the upper hand. But the minute I don’t, I get confused. I’ll think, I’m already in too deep, so I’m just going to let you guide me and see where we’re going next.”
“Open Door” features her music students from Canton High School Acapella Choir in Canton, Massachusetts singing on the chorus. Hart added the young choir to make the song sound more epic. Written while she was in China for a three month gig, Hart sings about the pitfalls of the music business. “It really just sums up my whole entire life in this career,” she said. “It can get so hard, and it’s so easy to stop. It takes a lot of effort and passion because it’s thankless sometimes. Sometimes when I play in New York, I’ll play for five people. Sometimes I do these gigs and get paid shit. It can get so discouraging.”
“Open Door” was particularly inspired by her time in China. The booking agent, whom she had worked with before she met Fleming, who got her the gig mislead her to believe she’d be playing in fancy Beijing nightclubs. Hart found herself in a bar in an unknown industrial port city named Balian singing with a drum machine.
“My agent was a real, real asshole, and he really screwed us over. In Chinese terms it’s small, but it’s still seven million people. It’s still a big city, but it’s not Beijing or Shanghai. The contract was very obscured from the truth. He told me we we’re going to have a five piece band with a drummer. We had no drummer. We had a synthesized drum machine. I was singing to Karaoke tracks with a bass line and a guitar. It was the cheesiest.”
Growing up, Hart was inspired by Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, and Celine Dion. As a teenager, she went for angst singer-songwriters Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, and Ani DiFranco. The first three singers represented the powerhouse vocal and the other three influenced her songwriting. “As I got older it was a of Motown, Stevie and Aretha,” she said. “That really shaped my style now.”
But don’t let her interest in the angst singer-songwriters fool you. Hart was not a nerdy neurotic as a teen. She has always been well rounded, joining school clubs, participating in the drama club, student council, taking music courses, and she played basketball and volleyball.
For now, Hart only wants to get her CD into as many people’s hands as possible. “At this point, I’m not trying to make money off of this record,” she said. “I just would love people to listen to it, and I’d love for it to really connect and resonate with them. I don’t know how this tour is going to go exposure-wise, but I’d love to be exposed to more cities around the United States.”
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