MCMS ISSUE 14: Julie Eddy Is Saying It With Her Full Chest

Julie Eddy has a simple way of describing her music.

If Miranda Lambert and Alanis Morissette could somehow have a baby, she jokes, that baby would sound a lot like her.

It is an introduction that makes more sense the longer she talks. Eddy’s music lives somewhere between country storytelling, rock guitars and the kind of emotional honesty that rarely bothers asking permission first. She describes the sound as bold and unapologetic, with plenty of oversharing and guitars big enough to match it. Onstage, the presentation gets even larger: heels, eyeliner, attitude and enough energy to make standing still feel almost impossible.

But underneath the larger-than-life exterior is an artist whose career has been shaped as much by sensitivity as confidence. Eddy cares deeply about how people connect with what she writes. She questions herself. She worries about whether the career will work. And even after years of chasing it, she still occasionally finds herself wondering whether continuing to pursue music makes any sense at all.

Then she remembers the kid who wanted this before she knew how difficult it would be.

From Dell Rapids to Nashville

Eddy grew up in Dell Rapids, South Dakota, a town of roughly 3,000 people. Her first clear memory of becoming hooked on performing came when she was 10 years old and sang the national anthem at a high school basketball game. The applause afterward was enough. She wanted to sing wherever anyone would let her.

Music was also encouraged at home. Eddy points first to her mother, who supported the pursuit once it became obvious that singing was more than a passing interest, but the person whose encouragement still brings emotion to her voice is her grandmother, Carol. Growing up only a few houses away, Eddy was surrounded by a musical family, and her grandmother repeatedly told her something she had learned from her own life: if there is a dream you want to chase, do it before you are left wondering what might have happened.

That advice eventually followed Eddy out of South Dakota. Before Nashville, she was living in Minneapolis and making trips south to write and perform. Eventually the back-and-forth began to feel like delaying an inevitable decision. In early 2021, she came to town, toured exactly one apartment, signed the lease that day, went back to Minneapolis and moved three weeks later.

There was not a long list of options or a carefully staged relocation plan. There was simply a moment when staying where she was began to feel riskier than leaving.

Nearly six years later, Nashville has become home.

Becoming the Artist She Actually Wanted to Be

Moving to Nashville did not immediately mean Eddy had figured out exactly what Julie Eddy music was supposed to sound like.

That came later.

She traces the real turning point to the creation of her last record, Playing House. For the first time, she felt surrounded by musicians, writers and producers who were willing to collaborate around what was genuinely true to her rather than what everyone thought might become a hit.

Somewhere in that process, Eddy says she simply decided to trust herself.

That shift changed the writing. Instead of filtering ideas through what she thought country music expected from her, she became more comfortable saying exactly what she wanted to say and deciding how she wanted it to sound. Playing House became less about discovering a clever direction and more about giving herself permission to stop second-guessing the one that had already been there.

The artists who influenced that confidence are easy for her to identify. Miranda Lambert and Alanis Morissette sit at the center because of how fearlessly both have written from their own perspectives. Then there is Dolly Parton, whose influence Eddy feels less in a specific sonic choice and more in the way she approaches being an entertainer.

Big hair.

Heavy eyeliner.

Attitude.

Eddy has learned that she does not need to choose between writing vulnerable songs and walking onstage like she owns the room.

Both can be true.

“74 Nova” Starts With Her Dad

That balance between personal storytelling and personality is at the center of Eddy’s newest release, “74 Nova,” out September 18.

The song began with her dad.

His first car was a bright yellow 1974 Chevrolet Nova with black racing stripes. He eventually sold it when he went to college, but years later, when Eddy was in high school, he bought another ’74 Nova and restored it to look like the car he remembered.

Eddy is the oldest of three siblings, which naturally turned the car into a running family debate: who eventually gets the Nova?

Her father added another joke to the conversation by repeatedly teasing her about never writing a song about it.

So she finally did.

In Eddy’s version of the story, her dad gives her the Nova and she takes it to Nashville while chasing music. It has not happened, but she is happy to call the song a little manifestation.

The family connection did not stop with the lyric. When Eddy went into the studio, she secretly used her dad’s 1967 Gibson SG Junior to record the guitar parts. The song about his car was made using his guitar, turning what could have simply been a nostalgic idea into something containing pieces of his actual history.

The result is intentionally lighter than some of Eddy’s deeper material. She describes “74 Nova” as a carefree, roll-the-windows-down kind of song, the type of record designed to feel good before the listener ever knows how much family history is sitting underneath it.

And Eddy is still joking that writing it should probably improve her odds of eventually getting the car.

The People Behind the Record

Eddy is quick to point out that songs like “74 Nova” are never the work of one person.

Her longtime producer Brad Hill has become one of the central creative relationships in her career, and the musicians surrounding the new single are people she speaks about with just as much affection personally as professionally. Saul Littlefield and Austin Adams played guitar, Dave Dorn played keys, Evan Hutchings handled drums and Leigh Francis played bass.

The writing partnership is equally important. Eddy wrote “74 Nova” with her close friend Maddie Lenhart, someone she describes as her right hand when it comes to turning her life into songs.

That emphasis on the people around her has only grown stronger since moving to Nashville. Eddy arrived expecting the city to feel relentlessly competitive, with everyone fighting for the same small number of opportunities. Instead, she found a community full of people who had all moved to the same place chasing something improbable.

The competition still exists. So do the closed doors.

But Nashville taught her that the relationships surrounding the artist often matter as much as the artist standing in the center.

Music Is a Business, Even When the Product Is You

One of the biggest misconceptions Eddy sees about building a career in Nashville is the idea that a talented artist simply needs a lucky break.

She sees the reality as far more complicated.

The writers matter. The musicians matter. The producer matters. The band matters. The people helping shape visuals, strategy and direction matter. The artist may be the name on the front, but a career is being built by a much larger collection of people.

Eddy also views the job more commercially than outsiders may expect.

At some point, she says, an artist has to understand that they are in sales. The thing being sold is not only a song. It is the sound, image, personality, music and overall world around the person making it. In that sense, she argues, music is not entirely different from any other business trying to convince someone to care about a product.

The uncomfortable difference is that in music, the product is deeply personal.

It is you.

That reality could have made Eddy more guarded.

Instead, lately it has done the opposite.

Opening the Door Wider

The biggest lesson of Eddy’s current season has been discovering that vulnerability is not something she has to ration.

There were times when she would stop herself from writing certain things because they felt too personal. What if someone misunderstood it? What if people judged her? What if the thing she was admitting publicly changed the way someone saw her?

Now she is beginning to view the risk differently.

The more honest she is, the more room there is for someone else to recognize themselves.

“If I open up wide,” she says, “it just gives more room for people to come in and join the party.”

That philosophy is really at the center of why Eddy writes songs at all. Her goal is not for listeners to hear her story exactly as she lived it. She wants to tell it clearly enough that someone else can place their own experience inside it.

In a world where people are constantly connected but still regularly convinced that nobody else understands what they are going through, Eddy wants a song to interrupt that feeling.

Maybe someone hears a line and realizes, I have felt that too.

For her, that is the point.

“If I Never Reach the Top”

No lyric explains Eddy’s relationship with music better than one she wrote with Ben Kadlecek in a song called “That Hill.”

“If I never reach the top, I’ll die on that hill.”

The song came out of one of Eddy’s recurring moments of doubt. She had reached the familiar point of asking why she was still chasing something so uncertain and whether it might finally be easier to stop.

Instead, she and Kadlecek started talking about what music actually represented in their lives.

The answer was bigger than a job.

Music had become too intertwined with who they were to simply walk away from it because the career was difficult. Writing “That Hill” allowed Eddy to take all the frustration, uncertainty and stubborn belief she was feeling and compress it into one line.

Even if the destination never looks exactly the way she imagines it, the pursuit itself still matters.

That lyric has become one of the clearest expressions of how Eddy views the career she chose.

And those doubts have not disappeared.

Eddy jokes that she considers quitting every other month. The questions still show up: How will this work? How will she afford it? Is it ever actually going to happen?

The thing that brings her back is often surprisingly simple.

She thinks about herself as a kid.

Eddy has talked with her therapist about that younger version of herself, and she returns to the idea whenever the career feels impossible. Even if nothing becomes dramatically bigger than it is right now, her younger self would still be thrilled to know she grew up and gets to make music.

There are not many people who can say they wake up every day doing what they dreamed about as a child.

Eddy can.

For now, that remains enough reason to continue.

The Listening Room and the Nashville She Imagined

There is one Nashville venue that connects Eddy’s earliest image of the city to the artist she eventually became.

The Listening Room Cafe.

The first time she ever visited Nashville, Eddy attended a writers round there when the venue was still in its old location. She remembers being struck by how quiet the room was and how closely the audience listened, not only to the songs but to the stories behind them.

For a songwriter, it felt almost unreal.

Playing that room became one of her first major Nashville goals.

She has since done it many times, but the experience has never become routine. Every time she plays there, Eddy says there is still a part of her that cannot quite believe people are willing to sit quietly and listen to her music and the stories behind it.

It remains one of the places where the dream she had before moving to Nashville and the reality of her life now overlap.

Her live show away from those listening rooms is considerably louder.

Eddy promises massive guitars, heavy drums, lots of movement, tall heels and probably at least one joke that may or may not land. The objective is not subtlety.

“We just get out there and knock down the door and have a good time,” she says.

That intensity is also where the contrast in Eddy becomes most obvious. The person running across a stage in stilettos and eyeliner can appear fearless, but she knows that image does not always tell the whole story.

Rough Around the Edges, Soft at the Center

Eddy understands why someone could look at the visual identity and assume she does not care what people think.

That assumption could not be much further from the truth.

She cares deeply about how her work makes people feel and about genuinely connecting with the people who choose to listen. The exterior may be bold, but behind it is someone who admits she would happily become best friends with everyone supporting the music.

“I might seem rough around the edges,” she says, “but I’m a softie at heart.”

That tension has become one of the most interesting parts of her identity.

She can be unapologetic without being indifferent.

She can write something brutally honest without pretending the reaction does not matter.

She can walk onstage like nothing scares her while still acknowledging that plenty of things do.

The confidence is not a lack of vulnerability.

Increasingly, the confidence comes from being willing to show it.

What Comes Next

Over the next year, Eddy is preparing for significantly more music.

She leaves the exact format intentionally open. There could be enough new material for another project. There could be significantly more touring. There could, hypothetically, even be a Julie Eddy album two.

But there is one goal that she is far less casual about.

The Grand Ole Opry.

Making her Opry debut has become one of the clearest goals in Eddy’s career. She keeps it on her vision board. She writes about it in her journal. In fact, she says she writes essentially the same sentence every day:

She is going to make her Grand Ole Opry debut.

It is less a vague dream than something she is deliberately trying to move toward.

Her advice to the younger version of herself feels written for that same journey.

Expect a lot of no’s.

Find ways around them.

Stay true to yourself.

Speak from the heart.

And when there is something worth saying, do not soften it just because someone else might be uncomfortable hearing it.

“Say whatever you got to say with ten toes down,” Eddy says. “Say it with your full chest.”

The rest, she admits, will still be hard.

But it can be worth it.

Unapologetic

Julie Eddy says her music is for the people who feel everything deeply. The ones who question themselves, question other people and question the world around them. The people who have wanted to be fully themselves but have sometimes been afraid of what might happen if they actually tried.

She especially thinks about people who have been overlooked.

Maybe that is why “unapologetic” is the word she chooses for whatever comes next.

It does not mean that Eddy suddenly has no doubts.

It means the doubts no longer get the final vote.

The girl from Dell Rapids who once sang the national anthem at a basketball game grew into an artist who moved herself to Nashville after touring one apartment, learned how to stop writing toward somebody else’s idea of a hit and discovered that the most useful thing she can bring to a room is the version of herself she previously might have edited out.

Now she is putting her dad’s old car into a song, playing his guitar on the record, writing the uncomfortable parts of her own life and working toward the stage she writes about in her journal every morning.

And when asked what people should know about what is coming next, Eddy does not make it complicated.

“We’re just getting started.”

Music City Musicians, Issue 014: Julie Eddy.

Reach Out

We'd love to work with you or your artists.

Contact

Connect

g21kaleb@gmail.com

740-260-6551

© 2025. All rights reserved.