Alana Springsteen

A co-writer on every track and co-producer on nearly all (while also playing guitar throughout), NPR hails, “Few artists dissect and make sense of life in your 20s quite like Alana Springsteen.” The first installment, TWENTY SOMETHING: Messing It Up, sheds a daringly honest light on the missteps Springsteen has taken on the way to finding her truth. “Messing It Up is about digging into the moments when you feel like you’re getting everything wrong,” she says. “I know I’ve definitely made a lot of mistakes so far, especially when it comes to matters of the heart and not listening to my gut.” On the larger-than-life lead single “you don’t deserve a country song,” Springsteen kicks off the album with a full-tilt Country anthem about reclaiming her power after a brutal breakup. “It’s about a guy I fell hard for who turned out to be a liar, which completely shook my sense of trust in myself,” she says. “It all came to a breaking point during the LANY tour, so everything was falling apart right when I was having some of the best experiences of my life. Finally, I realized I wasn’t going to let him take away any more of my joy, which is what inspired that song. It’s not angry or filled with negative emotions; it’s about deciding to put yourself first instead of letting someone overshadow all the incredible things you’ve got going on.”

On the unforgettably poignant “shoulder to cry on,” Springsteen turns more introspective as she attempts to unravel her longtime fear of vulnerability. “I’m an introvert, so I tend to retreat whenever I’m feeling something really deeply – that’s what feels safe to me,” she says. “A lot of the time when I need to let my emotions out, it’s just me alone in my room or pulled over in my car on the side of the road when I can’t keep it in anymore. But recently I’ve realized the flaw in closing myself off like that. Because when you’re able to make yourself vulnerable to someone else, it creates a real connection that’s so special.” Meanwhile, on “goodbye looks good on you,” fellow Nashville artist-songwriter and former tourmate Mitchell Tenpenny joins Springsteen for a slow-burning duet that she refers to as a form of manifesting. “When we were writing that song, Mitchell and I were talking about what it would be like if you could break up with someone and recognize that it was for the best,” Springsteen explains. “I’ve personally never had that experience, so it’s pretty idealistic, but I love the idea of making a clean break and being able to move on as friends.”

On TWENTY SOMETHING: Figuring It Out – part two of TWENTY SOMETHING – Springsteen focuses in on the wildly illuminating but sometimes-painful work of self-discovery. “A big part of your 20s is about getting to know yourself outside of who you are to your family or your friends,” she says. “I’m constantly learning about my defense mechanisms and attachment issues and so many other things, getting face-to-face with all of it and saying, ‘Okay, nice to meet you.’” On the album’s glorious title track, Springsteen takes stock of certain self-sabotaging tendencies with equal parts diary-like specificity and self-aware humor, opening up about everything from imposter syndrome to her hard-to-break habit of letting her car run on fumes. “For a long time, I’d been sitting on the idea of a song that encapsulates everything you go through in your 20s,” says Springsteen, who co-wrote “twenty something” with Liz Rose, Trannie Anderson, and AJ Pruis during a songwriting retreat at Rose’s beach house. “I had a voice memo of me at the piano, and we all just started digging in and talking about our different perspectives on that period of time. Eventually we landed on that hook (‘We know it all and don’t know nothing’), and everything fell into place from there.” As Springsteen points out, the pure transparency of “twenty something” has much to do with the idyllic surroundings of that retreat. “I grew up on the beach and that’s where I feel the most ease, the most myself,” she says. “I felt so at peace at Liz’s house, and being in an environment that looked so much like my hometown helped me get to a whole different level of vulnerability.”

A real-time account of finding her way in the world, Figuring It Out also delves into countless emotional experiences rarely examined in Pop songs. On “chameleon,” for instance, Springsteen speaks to the struggle of showing her most authentic self in the minefield of social interactions, with the track’s smoldering guitar tones intensifying her longing for true connection. “Depending on who I’m hanging out with or dating, I can fit the mold of whatever they need or want me to be,” she says. “It can be a superpower, but it’s also a way of hiding who I really am so that no one judge or hurt me.” On “when we were friends,” Springsteen shares a heavy-hearted but hopeful rumination on the fragility of friendships in your formative years. “It’s a song about accepting that sometimes people are meant to be in your life just for a season,” she says. “You grow together and might eventually grow apart, but it’s okay – it’s all a part of life, and there doesn’t need to be any guilt over that.” Next, on “ghost in my guitar (feat. Chris Stapleton),” Springsteen drifts into a moment of dreamy Alt-Pop minimalism as she explores how unresolved trauma can hold us back from much-needed growth. “If there’s something from my past I haven’t dealt with, the first place it’ll show up is in my songwriting,” admits Springsteen, who co-produced the track in L.A. with Ido Zmishlany. “This song is intentionally not a traditional vocal duet. I wanted it to be a duet between me and a lead guitar, so the guitar feature was crucial to this song. It represents the lingering presence of something (in my case, someone) who’s gone but also very much not. Every time I think I’ve written my way past the hurt, I’m reminded that I have a long way to go. The guitar had to be just as emotionally charged as a vocal would have been to hint at those lingering feelings and memories that just won’t let me be, and Chris’ signature guitar tone was the only one I ever heard on it in my head.” 

The third and final chapter, TWENTY SOMETHING: Getting It Right, serves as a full-hearted embrace of all the passions and convictions and perfectly human imperfections that make us truly ourselves. That celebration takes a fantastically fun turn on “look i like,” an up-close portrait of feeling instant infatuation and working up the courage to act on it. And on “amen,” Springsteen closes out the album with a slow-building epic that shines with the sublime self-assurance of knowing exactly what you want from life. “Coming from a small town, my life looks really different from the way I grew up, and sometimes I find myself comparing myself to other people and caring too much about what they think,” she says. “To me ‘amen’ is about making decisions because you know in your gut that it’s right for you, and not because you think it’s what you should be doing. I hope it empowers people to chase their own crazy dreams, and helps them to be brave enough to pursue whatever they feel their purpose is. There’s nothing more important in life than that.” 

Over the course of TWENTY SOMETHING’s 18 songs, Springsteen showcases the sophisticated lyrical chops she’s honed since writing her first song at age nine over the course of the marquee project. “Even when I was young, songwriting was a way for me to express these very deep feelings I had a hard time talking about with my friends and my family,” says Springsteen, who grew up singing in church and learned to play guitar at just seven years old. “A lot of times I’d find myself in a dark corner with my guitar, letting those feelings out and putting it all to melody.” By age 10, she’d started making trips to Nashville to co-write with industry heavyweights, a turn of events that led to her signing her first publishing deal when she was only 14. After making her debut with a self-titled EP in 2019, Springsteen went on to achieve such accolades as being named among the Class of 2023 for CMT’s Next Women of Country and MusicRow’s Next Big Thing; becoming a Celebrity Ambassador for the Ryan Seacrest Foundation; and earning recognition as “one of Nashville’s most buzzworthy emerging artists” from E! News. A particularly meaningful moment for Springsteen, her appearance at the Grand Ole Opry in October 2022 followed a firsthand invitation from Country superstar Luke Bryan – the very artist she watched from the side stage upon visiting the Opry for the first time. “When I was 10 my family and I got a backstage tour, and there’s a video of me telling my dad how I’m going to be on that stage someday,” says Springsteen, who included a clip of that home movie in the video for “you don’t deserve a country song.” “It was a real full circle moment to finally play there – one of those experiences you dream about your whole life.”  

For Springsteen, one of the greatest thrills of realizing her lifelong dreams lies is sharing those moments with her fans – a close-knit community she unfailingly considered in making creative decisions for TWENTY SOMETHING. “I wanted this record to feel like I’m sitting down and talking with my fans like they’re my best friends, because they are,” she says. “A big part of the production was getting very detailed in cutting the vocals and making sure I landed on exactly the right tone.” And by keeping hands-on in every aspect of the album-making process, Springsteen ultimately arrived at an essential new level of confidence in her creative vision. “One thing I’ve learned is that the more I lean into what sets me apart, the more I’m able to connect with the people who need to hear what I have to say,” she notes. “Making this album taught me to trust my instincts, which all goes back to how important it is to really get to know yourself – because the more I learn about myself, the better I understand the world around me. I hope the album helps give people the courage to go on their own journey of knowing themselves better, and I can’t wait to hear all their stories about whatever they learn.”