Jana Kramer logs onto the screen all smiles, the kind of smile that tells you she’s held together with equal parts grit and duct tape. She’s here to talk about Voices, her new single, and it doesn’t take long for the veneer to crack just enough to let the truth slip through. “I feel like so many of us have these negative voices in our head,” she says. “I’m not enough, I’m broken, I’m not worthy of love… all those things. And it’s just like—no. I am worthy.”
It’s the kind of pep talk people save for therapists or late-night texts, but Kramer folds it straight into the song. And the song landed in her lap in the most on-the-nose way possible: written by Sarah Bryce, who had all but front-row seats to Kramer’s divorce unraveling in real time. “She heard everything I was saying about myself,” Kramer says. “When she brought me the song, I just broke down. It was my saving grace.”
Kramer calls Voices the anthem she needed to hear. It’s not a sad-song-to-match-your-sad-day situation; it’s the opposite, a track that argues with your inner critic like an overprotective friend. She laughs when I ask if she notices the narrative thread between Voices and last year’s single, Untouchable. “Oh, it’s totally the journey,” she says. “I don’t know what tomorrow holds, but I’m gonna keep walking through it. There’s a lot of emotion to get through, but there’s hope too.”
Of course, Kramer’s journey has never been allowed to be just her journey. When your personal life becomes a Google search term, you don’t get the luxury of a quiet collapse. “Everything gets picked apart and criticized,” she says. “But I try to change the narrative. When my ex and I were going through infidelity, I wanted to show how we were growing. Now it’s about showing the progress and the healing. I know I’m not the only one going through it.”
And then her phone lights up. “Oh my God, Sarah Bryce is calling me right now,” she says, laughing as she declines it. “Sarah, I’m doing interviews for our song!”
Still, the toughest part isn’t the strangers offering commentary on her life—it’s balancing all this with motherhood. Kramer has two kids who will someday read every headline, which means she filters her public honesty through a parental lens. “They’ll be able to Google Mom and Dad,” she says. “So I’m careful. I don’t want them to read things I can’t take back.”
The kids also function as tiny accountability coaches. “My daughter caught me crying the other day,” she says. “I’m like, ‘Mommy’s sad too, and that’s okay.’ And then she’ll grab my phone and pretend she’s filming like me, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh God, I’m creating a monster.’” That’s normally where other parents would lie, but Kramer seems allergic to pretending. “I heard myself telling her, ‘Don’t do that, don’t do that,’ when she was just being a kid. It made me stop and go, okay, where can I grow here?”
The imaginative space of childhood—something she’s talked about elsewhere—finds its way into her creative decisions too. “I won’t sing anything I can’t relate to,” she says. “I’ve done that. Never again.” Which is probably why the new stuff feels bigger. Wilder. Less concerned with fitting into any neat country box. “Some of the songs lean pop, some Avril Lavigne, some country,” she says. “And I can put them all on one EP because I’m independent. I can do whatever I want.”
Independence, of course, comes with its frustrations. No label support means no label budget. But it also means no label veto power, which Kramer relishes. Her producer recently worked on Katy Perry’s last single, and with him she’s learned to stretch her voice into places she never bothered to try before. “I’m singing my freaking heart out,” she says. “Why not?”
Her listening habits don’t make her job any easier to categorize: Halsey, Patsy Cline, James Taylor, Eminem. “I’ve never been able to put myself in a box,” she shrugs. Must be liberating—especially now, when she’s never sounded more aware of her own agency.
And while music is the focus at the moment, Kramer’s also juggling a Lifetime movie (The Holiday Fix-Up, coming December), a wine brand (One Brick), and her long-running podcast Wine Down. It’s a lot, but she makes it sound like it’s all held together by ambition and caffeine. “I love creating,” she says. “And I’m a mom. I’ve gotta support my kids. I’ll do anything and everything for them.”
I ask if the happy endings in the Lifetime world feel like wish-fulfillment or narrative alignment. She smiles the kind of smile that isn’t duct tape at all, but maybe something like optimism. “I have a lot of love to give,” she says. “I hope one day I’m cherished the way I’d love to cherish someone else.”
A Lifetime-style ending if ever there was one—only she’s writing this one herself.
Watch the interview above and then check out Voices below.
