Exclusive Q&A: Jenna Paulette On Building Out Her New Album, ‘Horseback,’ While On A Journey From Heartbreak To Happiness

Jenna Paulette is entering a completely new chapter of life as a wife and a soon-to-be mom. To help her usher in this chapter, she has unleashed her sophomore album, HORSEBACK, a collection of work that documents many of the moments of heartbreak, love, freedom, self-discovery and everything in between that has led her to become the person she is today. 

The songstress showed fans an incredibly vulnerable look into her life with her debut album, The Girl I Was, which was written when she was in the midst of finding her way out of a toxic relationship. A lot has changed for Paulette since then, including finding love with her now-husband, Ross, and learning that she’s pregnant with a baby girl. 

Additionally, she signed with the independent record label Leo33 at the start of 2024 and has been hard at work writing, recording, and finding joy in this creative process ever since. From the very first track, “Wild Is Her Favorite Color,” all the way to the closing tune, “A Hill To Die On,” HORSEBACK takes fans on a journey through raw reflection as Paulette unapologetically reveals her true self within each of the 13 songs. 

Country Now recently sat down with Jenna Paulette to discuss her new album, the unique writing process behind several of the tracks, how her journey with pregnancy has impacted her music, and more. Learn more in this exclusive Q&A below. 

What has it been like building out this new project while also experiencing a major shift in your personal life as a soon-to-be first-time mom?

I’m almost nine months pregnant. Like things have just been crazy, but we decided to go ahead and release the record like we planned. I think mid-summer, I was like, what are we doing? But it feels so right and all of the preparation, of course, was way longer than eight months. We started in January and really took our time with the A&R process. I’m so lucky to have Daniel Lee on my team. He’s just a songman in a world where I don’t think they exist much anymore. I’ve always kind of wanted to be an artist that writes her own stuff, but much like Miranda [Lambert], cuts the best outside songs that she can. So it’s been a fun process with this record and with cutting outside stuff and then also writing for myself and for the project as a whole with an overhead view versus the last record I put out, so I’m thankful for it. 

Has this creative process felt even more special than because it’s happening while you’re pregnant with your first child?

It’s interesting writing all of those songs and then being on the other side of recording them and knowing that I’m having a little girl. Like, “Wild Is Her Favorite Color” and “Prairie Primrose” and “Horseback,” I feel like I’m writing about somebody that I know but it’s an extension of myself and of Ross, my husband. I just feel like this little girl is gonna have her own little stubborn, beautiful, wild nature about her. When we found out she was a girl, we had just cut “Wild Is Her Favorite Color” and “Horseback” and I just remember I was cooking for cowboys at this ranch in West Texas. There’s like 14 guys on the crew and I was in my first trimester and nobody on my team knew that I was pregnant yet, but we did the blood test to figure out what the baby was. I was out there cooking and the boss’s wife made cupcakes that had a pink center to tell us that it was a girl and it was just so sweet and quaint and us to find out that way in the middle of nowhere. I just remember that night, going back to the cookhouse where we were staying and being like, Oh, my gosh, I’ve been writing this record for this girl that I’m carrying and it just feels like the sweetest gift in the world to not have known that and feel like God’s hand was in it all.

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Coming off your debut album, The Girl I Was, how does HORSEBACK reflect where you’re at personally and professionally at the moment?

So I wrote The Girl I Was on a retreat, I was like, Oh my gosh, this is the umbrella that everything fits under, because for me, the goal was always to keep one foot on the ranch and one foot in the music industry. I think you have to spend time in Nashville in order to understand the way the music business works and write songs with the best people and find your team and all of those things and I was in the process of that for that whole record pretty much. Met the love of my life at the end of it and obviously we’ve got so many good things happening for us personally, but that record was like a cumulation of the time that I spent here and me finally being like, you know what? I can do this and be who I am, and I don’t have to neglect the girl that made me want to sing country music in the first place.

She’s the little girl that fell in love with country music and her granddad’s pickup truck checking cows. I just love that there was a lot of freedom that came in that song and then under the umbrella of it being the title track off my debut record. Then moving into this new phase of life, I split my time between Nashville and Texas and my husband, and I have six horses and are living the dream in a lot of ways. I’ve played 60 dates so far this year, put out a debut record, I’m having a baby. There’s just this sweet balance in my life right now where the songs can come from a very real place. 

How did “Horseback” end up being the title of this collection? 

We worked on that song probably three or four different days to get it right and that song is just like, you know what? I’m never going back to the girl that wasn’t who I am today and that wasn’t the little girl in the pickup truck listening to country music with her granddad. I can do anything that I set out to do the way that I feel like it should be done and it’s going to be better for it…We had written that song and my team was so excited about it, but we were all like, it doesn’t feel right. At first it was a breakup song and I was like this just doesn’t feel right. It needs to be my “Wide Open Spaces.” So I wrote and rewrote that song in the saddle, thinking through how to do it the right way probably three or four times and then got back together with Lydia and Will who wrote it with me and worked out all the finite details. Then I was like, this is the title track. This is the perspective that I get to have on life and the place that I think through everything that matters to me. It just it became like I was talking about the girl; I was being the umbrella song to the whole record. And I’m so thankful for it.

Knowing that you have a little girl on the way, has your approach to songwriting started to shift at all?

Yes, and I know that it’s going to affect me moving forward. I was in a meeting a couple of weeks ago and one of the guys said, ‘you know, it’s interesting. So many people would look at getting pregnant as a negative thing for a woman and in country music, but I couldn’t imagine your perspective on things without having a family.’  And I was just so thankful because I’m it’s a very influential man in the country music industry saying that to me and he’s so right. My outlook on things, my art wouldn’t be complete without a family. I’m just so grateful for it and I think it gives new purpose to everything that you do. You don’t think about it as six months from now, you think about passing something down. This whole record is really a collection of perspectives for me. It’s my granddad’s perspective in “The Prophet,” and then “3 Kings,” our view on a Friday night and on life in general. So it’s just a collection of people that I love and the way that we look at life together and it makes more sense with a family intact. “A Hill To Die On,” we cut that and that was kind of the final sweet little kiss on this record of this is where I’m headed and this is what I represent and it just feels more whole.

What was it like getting to document this chapter with a maternity shoot while filming the music video for “Run The Damn Ball”? 

Since January, I’ve played like 60 plus shows and every time I’ve been home, we’ve been shooting pretty much for this record. So it’s been nonstop at my house and we live in the middle of nowhere so people stay with us pretty much every time they come out to shoot anything and I haven’t had time to even think about a maternity shoot. I was like, okay, we’re going to shoot this video. I’m going to bring this extra outfit and we’re going to shoot in my friend’s chicken coop. And she is a dear friend of mine. Her name’s Peyton Hughs. I was like, “Girl, I need to use your chicken coop for about 20 minutes. We just need to get this shot right now.” It was an extra thing that I asked Quinton Cook to do while we were there and we were on the time crunch, so it is a miracle that he even said yes because the sun was going down. But it is something I will cherish forever, and I was like, if I don’t do this right now, I’m going to miss my shot. So we just kind of made the most of every minute.

Can you share a look into the writing process behind this song and what it means to you?

That song, I mean, “settle down, go to church,” it’s just about the simple things in life and how when you do them all to the best of your ability on a daily basis, they all stack up to a big win in life. I’m a Texan and I love football. So my life lessons have come from either working cows or team sports and I love to watch football. It’s been a thing I’ve done with my granddads and my dad, my brother, my whole life and it just made so much sense to me to cut that song. I think it’s interesting also as a female, cause I’m a girl, but I’m not girly. Like I’m feminine, but I’m not girly. I love to work with my hands and do all of that stuff so it was just this perfect balance to say, “Pass the green beans around the damn ball.” 

Can you talk a bit more about the sentimental meaning behind “A Hill To Die On”?

I actually wrote it with my brother-in-law, Smith Ahnquist, he writes for HARDY, and Lynn Hutton and I knew it was a Lynn Hutton idea because Lynn and I write at the same publishing company and you figure out what people are good at landing, save your best hooks for the people you know can write them. I had that song idea in my head for a while and I love my brother-in-law, and I knew he could land it as well and that he could do it from the perspective of truly knowing me. So I went in there and I was like, okay, I know things are heating up politically, all of these things that people put their stake in the ground and get their opinion on and that’s all well and good, but that’s not a hill I want to die on. I want to die on the hill that’s a mile up on a mountainside and my husband and I live a mile up on a mountainside in this little house. The whole course kind of fell out from there, but yeah, it just felt like the right way to end that record. Yes, there are things that I care about and that I stand for, but at the end of the day, the things that I list in that chorus are the things that I want to hang my hat on and for people to know my character by.

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What was it like writing some of these songs while in the saddle?

So many of these songs, I’ll be pushing bulls or something out in the pasture…one day we were gathering bulls and my husband and a friend of his were dropping them to me in the center. So I was just pushing anything they brought me and had 12 or 13 bulls in front of me. The whole chorus to “Prairie Primrose” just popped into my head that day. It was like in between February, March, when stuff was starting to bloom and the whole chorus came into my brain, and I had Will Bundy and Lydia Vaughn coming out to write with me in West Texas where we live. We wrote the song, “Horseback,” and three or four others on this retreat. So many of the ideas came to me there, because I’m doing this almost involuntary thing, which I think is the best place for an idea to come in. It’s like you’re doing something that you know how to do, but your brain is half-engaged. 

You’re going to be performing at the Grand Ole Opry on the album release night. What can we expect from this performance?

I’m so excited about performing these songs in general, but it’ll be “Run the Damn Ball” and “Horseback.” I was like, you know what? These two songs are both relatable, obviously, but one of them is just outlook on life and football season’s here and I can just feel the excitement in the air and it’s a fun one to kick off that stage with and just kind of get everybody on the same page in the audience. Then “Horseback” just felt right. I was like, this is the song, it’s the focus track for the record and singing it there carrying this little girl and feeling all the feels is just going to be so, so special. And I’m just excited to take her with me and be singing a song that I really truly believe has part of her.