Now here’s a song that all women could do well to pay attention to.

A gentile fiddle and piano intro moves into a humble, propulsive melody that swells into a spot-on chorus.  Everything about “Julianna” as a production feels top-notch and that’s before even listening to the lyrics. 

“Julianna” is a powerful meditation on this vicious cycle that some women and teen girls often find themselves in in order to ‘feel loved’ by somebody.  They think they need to wear a tiny dress and eight-inch Jimmy Choo pumps with the right Gucci purse in order to be loved.  But the true fact is that they don't.  What better way than to deliver this message to teens than to hear it from a teenager herself.  At 18-years-old Emma Jacob (who was known previously as Emma Mae) certainly is a great spokesperson for this kind of message. 

Clothes and highs and appearances and such things don’t make a person beautiful, their essence, their being is what makes them beautiful and the things that some girls do ‘to get ahead’ don’t really add-up in the end and end up hurting the girl, in this case “Julianna” more than they help her the way she had hoped. 

Emma Jacob’s vocal performance is powerful and hopefully radio will allow this song to slide in next to the sillier fare that gets played in the summer and fall.  It’s a message that is worth hearing over and over again, no matter if you are the girl like “Julianna.” 

Oh, if you don’t believe in the power of this song to connect to audiences you don’t have to take my word for it; you can take a look at a comment a young girl named Jessica left on the comment thread for the audio preview of this song:

“With one hell of a past I have lost my way at such a young age. My step-dad broke me down as a child. He told me I was never good enough and I was ugly just like my mother. Well, now at sixteen i'm away from both him and my mother and I don't even know what it feels like to be beautiful. Honestly, I have done things you can never imagine just to have somebody call me beautiful. But I was beautiful to them for the wrong reasons. This song is amazing and I listen to it every day hoping one day I will feel beautiful again. Songs like these give music their true definition.“

This is the power of music and the power this song has to reach people when simple words can't.