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20-year-old singer and songwriter Jessie Murph likes to respond to TikTok comments. But lately, they’ve been getting meaner — more personal, more targeted, more critical. She felt it after “Blue Strips,” on which she raps and sings about tipping badly in a strip club as an act of revenge, spouting brash bravado and money. She’s baffled by the amount of videos people are making about her, and what they mean for her life and work.
They’re perhaps the number one indicator that her career is about to get a whole lot bigger, and a whole lot more out-of-control.
“I'm glad that I make people have some sort of reaction. I'd rather them be like, ‘I hate you,’ or ‘I love you,’ rather than, ‘I feel indifferently,’ I guess,” Murph tells Teen Vogue over extra-sweet vanilla cappuccinos in May, two months before her second album, Sex Hysteria, comes out and provokes another wave of strong reactions. “But still, I just find it f*cking weird… I don't have any hate in my heart… That's been something that I've been trying to figure out how to navigate and not react and get mad because it totally makes me be like, ‘F*ck you, bitch.’"
Murph’s energy is disarming — all big blue eyes and giggles, showing up to Teen Vogue’s offices in hot pink low rise jeans and white cowgirl boots, hair bumped high so as to be closer to God. She laughs easily about herself and at the ways people can be. She’s simultaneously assertive about who she is and a little unsure about what she believes to be true; she’s 20, just beginning to understand herself in a larger context, as a pop star and as a person. She’s big on Southern hospitality and respecting servers. She hates dress codes. She knows she’s got daddy issues.
She’s pretty sure she was born in Clarksville, Tennessee, or maybe nearby Nashville. She has some memory of Nashville in those early years, a lot of land, some goats. Around three, her family picked up for Alabama, first to Huntsville, then to the small town of Athens for her middle and high school years, “very deep in the Bible belt,” she says. The Christianity was mandatory, but the youth group was fun. (“People sleep on youth group.”)
But whether it was the church or the small town, she felt some kind of discomfort. “There’s a lot of judginess that comes with that stuff sometimes,” Murph says. “There was definitely a lot of hate on what I wanted to do, but it made me very motivated to prove everyone wrong.”
In high school she was a cheerleader going to bonfire parties. I ask if she was a popular kid. She demures with a quintessential popular kid euphemism, “I was friends with everybody in school. I was friends with all types of people.” But then COVID hit when she was a sophomore, and she couldn’t focus on online school, and so she began making music, posting covers on TikTok. She came home from cheer practice one day to find her first viral video. “I remember feeling [like], it’s time to put my head down and really do this sh*t.”
That was around four years ago. Murph has now sold out national tours and released two albums and a slew of singles. This year, she took her cheerleading practice to Coachella, leaping up on top of her dancers’ shoulders before dismounting into their cradle. Her raspy, earnest voice has been compared to Amy Winehouse, a clear reference point, but with a Southern drawl and Priscilla Presley aesthetic. Amy by way of Lana Del Rey’s fascination with nostalgia and Hip-Hop.
It’s a bit of cosplay, but it’s not exactly a character or alter ego; she wanted to, but it doesn’t actually feel that separate from herself. “I don't feel like I'm creating a character,” she says. “This album is combining a lot of the things I just love into one. I've always loved Priscilla Presley. And Elvis, I'm very inspired by that. I don't know, I just think the aesthetic is beautiful in big hair. It makes me feel like… maybe it is kind of a character. It makes me feel better when it's bigger.”
Part of the reason fans reacted the way they did to “Blue Strips” is because they prefer when Murph uses her prodigious vocal talent for devastation. Her voice is powerful, throaty and blunt; fans often reference a poignant song on her first album, “What Happened to Ryan,” about losing a friend to substance abuse. It’s one of many songs in her oeuvre that reference drugs and alcohol, directly or as metaphor.
But there is devastation to be found on Sex Hysteria. On “Heroin,” the drug is a simile for always coming back to someone who is harmful to you, but it manages to not feel cliched — “There's a violence in the way I long for you / And it's a war, the way you love me like you do.” And the album’s best song is one that nearly didn’t make it on the album, the cutting country song, “The Man That Came Back,” written about her father.
“I'm currently debating taking it off the album,” she admits of the song she wrote when she was 17. She had wanted to release it for a while, but kept getting too scared to do it. “I just don't want to hurt anybody.”
“My entire childhood after he left, my mom and everyone would be like, ‘How do you feel about it?’ And I would be like, ‘Completely fine. I feel nothing.’ I never actually had the feeling because I was so disassociated from it,” she says. “Even up until 17, I had no feelings until my mom and I started talking about what their relationship looked like behind closed doors, things that I didn't know. And that made me so angry to see somebody, my mom, to see somebody I love, talk about how they were treated. So I sat down and I think all those feelings kind of culminated and came out at once and I was like, ‘Oh sh*t. I guess I do feel some type of way about this.’”
She still isn’t quite sure how much she wants to talk about what she’s been through in interviews, which she says make her really anxious. “I think that writing these songs is the only way I would ever be able to talk about some of this stuff because I'm like, otherwise, it almost feels too loud, especially things that I don't even talk to my family about… I never want to burden anybody, which is not a great way to think about things, but it just feels easier for me to put it in a sonic form.”
The music does the talking instead, and Sex Hysteria has a lot to say — and surely many people will have much to say about it. But fundamentally, it’s an album about sex and money that is actually about trauma, violence, coping mechanisms, and recognizing patterns in love that emerge from your life experiences, even if the recognition doesn’t really lead to changing them. A desire to be loved and accepted above all else, and an understanding that the way she’s seeking that out leads to sometimes troubling situations.
“It's such an obvious pattern. It's a vicious cycle,” she says. “I think what you grow up seeing is sometimes what you attract later in life, unfortunately. And I think that was definitely the story told with this album.”
Since the beginning of her career, Murph has fused country and Hip-Hop and pop music, and she’s leaned more into Hip-Hop and R&B stylings on this record. She’s aware that she’s part of a trend of white musicians (especially those who come from country music) inspired by Black music traditions (including country itself). The blend seems natural to her, both because of what the genres encompass and the simple fact that in middle school she loved Gucci Mane and Lil Baby alongside the country that was on the radio.
“I think that they feel real and they're raw, that's why I personally gravitate towards both [genres],” she says. “You can hear the grit and you can hear the life story in them… I think it's so sick how everybody's doing country right now, honestly. Everyone's doing their version of it. I've always thought that everyone's music is always a culmination of what they listen to growing up. Everyone's always chasing the feeling of nostalgia. I don't know. I think music being thrown into a blender is beautiful.”
Notably, Gucci Mane and Lil Baby are both featured on different songs on her album, and the track “Gucci Mane” — the album’s thesis — pledges that she sampled his song “Lemonade” in order to “make him proud.” The Lil Baby feature was a major surprise; the head of her label sent the finished mix to her with the caption, “Happy birthday.” Murph hit play. “I started crying in a Cracker Barrel,” she grins. “He's always been my dream collab.”
On July 18, Murph released Sex Hysteria and with it the explicit music video for “1965,” a song that on first listen immediately conjured images of TikTok pontifications — many of them probably warranted. One fan made a TikTok captioned, “Please tell me she’s joking,” to which Murph responded, “That is quite literally the point.”
Lyrically, “1965” is about wanting to be so free from modern dating woes, so badly wanting the romantic handwritten letters, that you’re willing to cede the power dynamic to men. The hook: “I think I'd give up a few rights, if you would just love me like it’s 1965.”
That is, to be clear, an absurd statement. The lyrics leverage an eyebrow-raising playfulness that edgelords over into troubling tradwifery. Murph is expecting me to ask about them.
“I had a feeling you were going to ask about that,” she says. “That whole song is kind of a joke. I've been watching all of these old movies, a lot of '60s movies, and everything seems so romantic. It's a movie, so it's probably a lie. But I don't know, everything was slower. Everybody was more in the moment, I think. I really like a gentleman. But I didn't mean that line.”
Even so, it’s a bad joke with bad timing. When I mention the word tradwife, referring to the “traditional wife” cultural and social media-fueled movement that celebrates domesticity and dated gender roles, Murph seems uncomfortable with the notion. “Yeah, I don't actually want that. I love having rights,” she says. “On the record, I love rights.” (“Specifically [for] women. Like, what the f*ck. Bodily rights specifically,” she clarifies.)
Is the lyric, like many provocations, underpinned by something real? Potentially a desire for life to not feel so flooded with information and opinions and disrespect, especially coming from men? “I'm trying to read books. If I didn't have to have a phone for what I do, I would not have a phone,” she says, adding that she’s reading Cher’s autobiography.
There’s also something true about the thought that while life is generally better for women now — in 1965, we needed men to cosign home mortgages and credit cards and could not legally have abortions, and Black women had only just received federal voting rights — things are not as progressive as they might seem. Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, has been overturned, internet misogyny is rampant, and men still treat women like sh*t. The 18+ music video, while shocking and with a clear content warning, also makes “1965” look pretty bleak.
Sex Hysteria is an album of contradictions. You can see the patterns and not change them; try to have agency and end up underwater; attempt to explore violence on your own terms to make it less scary, less of a hidden thing waiting to destroy you, and end up destroyed anyway. You can think you want an “old-timey” love and also know that’s kinda f*cked up.
Murph didn’t necessarily process all that while she was making the album. “I'm never thinking about a project in a whole when I make it, I'm always just going in that day and writing what's on my heart. But normally after an album, I'll look at it and be like, it teaches me a lesson.” She pauses, “This is the first time I've sat down and actually thought about this, and I'm like, oh sh*t. This is, obviously, I should heal.”
Still, she’s 20 years old. She thinks she has a few more years of f*cking up ahead.
“No, I think I'm going to f*ck up a lot. I think I'm going to f*ck up so much. I feel like I'll be canceled, like, at least four times,” Jessie Murph says. “I want to not be scared, you know? I want to just do what I want and if people don't like it, then they can cancel me. But you always get uncancelled, depending on what it is. I'm a good person. I'm not going to do anything crazy.”
