Country singer Jordana Bryant on missing Pennsylvania, turning 18 and Christmas music

It’s been more than a year since rising country singer Jordana Bryant officially made the move from outside Philadelphia to Nashville. It’s been a relatively smooth transition for the 18-year-old, but there are at least two things she misses about Pennsylvania.

”Yes, I definitely miss Wawa,” she said with a laugh in a recent phone call from Nashville. “What I would say is I miss Pennsylvania falls. There’s really nothing like the, you know, the color is changing and I would say it’s a little bit strange here going to like a pumpkin patch when it’s like 75 degrees out and it’s a little bit different. Fall’s one of my favorite seasons so I definitely do miss the Pennsylvania fall.”

Bryant will get a chance to enjoy the fall foliage soon enough, as she’ll be opening for viral country star Alexandra Kay on Friday at Mr. Smalls Theatre in Millvale. After a stint on the road with Girl Named Tom earlier this fall, Bryant’s eager to get back on the road where she can meet fans in real life.

“I think it’s just such an incredible experience getting to meet people who your music really matters to,” she said. “And I think on social media numbers can become very disconnected with the people who they actually represent. And I think sometimes you can be, ‘Oh, well, this video didn’t get however many million views’ or ‘This only got this many.’ But when you actually put those people in a room, it’s such an incredible thing. And it really, for me, is what makes it all worth it. It really means so much to me getting to meet people who my music has made an impact on them.”

Bryant is no stranger to viral videos, with a pair of covers on YouTube garnering 4 million combined views and three TikToks with more than 849,000 views each. She’s already released a self-titled EP this year in addition to several singles like “Best Friend” and her latest, “18,” which came out in September.

Having graduated high school a year early so she could pursue her music career, Bryant just turned 18 this year, so a coming-of-age track like “18” seems fitting. Other than being allowed to buy a lottery ticket — “I haven’t done that yet,” she said with a laugh — not a lot has changed for Bryant since her birthday.

“I feel like it’s very honest about just what I had been feeling,” she said. “I think growing up, I always assumed that once I turned 18 and became an adult that I would have it all figured out, and I just assumed that all adults knew what they were doing and the older I get, I feel like the more I realized that just isn’t true.

“And I think no one at any age has it all figured out because we’re all still growing and learning and on our own journeys, and that’s the beauty of life, right?”

With influences like Taylor Swift, Carrie Underwood and Ed Sheeran (her first concert, by the way) — “I call them my holy trinity of my top three artists,” she said — Bryant is blending the mainstream music of her friends with the country she grew up listening to with her parents. She also cited Shania Twain, Reba McEntire and Dolly Parton as influences.

“I feel like Taylor Swift’s songwriting is really just honest and really relatable in that sense,” Bryant said. “And I think Ed Sheeran melodically does such an incredible job of really captivating people right from the first moment he kind of opens his mouth. And so I love pairing the storytelling aspect of country music with more of the melodic influences of pop music.”

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As for the future, Bryant is hoping to play the Grand Ole Opry in the next year and headline her own tours in the coming years.

“Beyond any of that, I really just want to be creating music that really speaks to people and that people really connect to and that makes an impact on them,” she said. “And I hope the number of people that I can do that for continues to grow. But ultimately, if I’m doing that, that is going to be extremely fulfilling to me. And that’s really what I hope to do with my music.”

More immediately, she has some new original music coming next year. And on Friday, she’ll release a cover of Chris Rea’s “Driving Home for Christmas.”

“I grew up listening to this song during the Christmas season. It was the first song on our Christmas playlist. And we would always play that playlist whenever we were decorating our tree, baking Christmas cookies or whatever,” she said. “And I always assumed that song was one of the classic, most popular Christmas songs, up there with ‘All I Want for Christmas is You’ and ‘Last Christmas.’

“And it was only really in the last year or two that I realized no one else in the U.S. knew this. And it’s actually a song that got really popular in the U.K. And my parents lived there for about five years before they had me. And so they must have heard it over there and then continued playing it when they came back to the U.S. And so it’s a song that I hope to get to share with more people over here because, to me that is what I think of when I think of Christmas.”