It’s hard to believe that A Woman Needs, Jessica Harp’s solo debut may also be her final solo project. A couple of weeks ago, Jessica announced that she would be leaving her artist career to focus on her songwriting career. As sad as that is, I am extremely happy to be able to finally share my thoughts about A Woman Needs. I’ve had a copy of the record for months now and it quickly became one of my favorite albums to listen to while driving doing anything.
A spirited album, the record is full of up-tempo tracks with attitude that run the gamut from the shoulda-been single “Breakup Song” to “More To This Than You” to the album’s hit “Boy Like Me.” “Homemade Love” is a cutely romantic track with a progressive melody and a sing-a-long ready chorus and some strong harmonies from one of country music’s most well-recognized vocalists and artists, Vince Gill. “Letting Go” and “Love Letter” are both interesting acoustic singer-songwriter-y ballads that showcase a deeper, strong voice than some were likely to give Jessica Harp credit for. “Letters” is a hopeful and romantic track about the power of love in its written form while “Letting Go” is about what you’d expect the song to be about, a break-up but the lyrics like “sometimes gone is really gone and letting go means letting go and I did and you won’t” might be, in many ways a strong goodbye to her fans, like it was written just for them in places.
“Someone Else’s Life” is another interesting track in that it finds Jessica Harp behind walls blocking her from embracing life and living it to its fullest while “A Woman Needs,” the title track and second charting single, finds Jessica singing about living without any walls and the fact that making mistakes is part of finding ourselves. It’s a song that Jessica is living right now as she made the hard choice to abandon the biggest dream in her life, a music star, to be ‘just’ a songwriter. While this decision has left many fans saddened, she was able to leave them with this beautiful gift of an album, an album that still is as fresh listening to it today is it was the first time I heard A Woman Needs a few months ago and that’s “Good Enough For Me” and it’s a more than good enough goodbye (for now) for her fans. It’s also one of the best albums I’ve heard the last couple of years, it’s that strong, which is why it’s great to listen to while doing anything.
You can support Jessica Harp by purchasing this album at Amazon ($5.99) Amazon (Exclusive CD Retailer) or iTunes ($7.99).
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