Porter’s sophomore project is available now
On March 1st, independent country artist and TikTok star Peytan Porter released her new project, Grown, which is a testament to her growth personally and musically. The gritty six-song EP, all co-penned by Porter, features an earthy sound coupled with thought-provoking, identity-exploring lyrics that won’t flinch from the places where she stands apart – whether that’s musically or against the backdrop of her traditional small-town upbringing.
“Grown is kind of my coming-of-age story,” Porter tells us exclusively. “I put out a project and it it kind of sent me in a spiral of figuring out who I am, and I just didn’t really feel like I was showing all of the sides of myself. And so I took some time off and made a bunch of adult decisions like cutting my bangs and moving into a sketchy apartment and decorating it with a bunch of weird stuff that none of my friends would have chosen and my mom definitely wouldn’t have chosen for me to use. But it was just kind of a stepping into my own and, um becoming of age and the beauty and the ugly parts.”
Peytan recently released, “Lemonade,” a song with a fresh twist on a classic phrase. Written by Porter, Ian Christian and Matt Willis, and tied together with a live-and-let-live theme, the song explores the concept of tapping into various vices to cope with the challenges of day-to-day life.
“We wrote that one during the pandemic over Zoom and we had all just kind of been misplaced, and we were all laughing about the ins and outs of being back in our small towns after being in Nashville and I think Matt was the one who had a neighbor who was growing pot in his basement. And my dad is a UPS man. I knew my mom was eavesdropping when I was writing songs at the kitchen counter, so I wanted to say something to try and get a reaction. So I started talking about women who maybe were checking my dad out on his route, and my mom poked her head and she was like, ‘Don’t say that.’ And so of course I kept it in the song. So it was just kind of this whole thing about really looking around us at a new perspective that we hadn’t been in in a minute and talking about how everybody is really good at not minding their own business and how sometimes it’s important to just let people live and let them do whatever they need to do to get through. That’s a common theme. I think in the songs that I write and just kind of my perspective on the world everybody needs to take care of their own before they start worrying about everybody else’s.”
A self-proclaimed small-town misfit from Dawsonville, GA, she’s breaking the molds of both polished commercial country music and the rootsy craft behind Americana, hooking listeners with vivid tunes that feel universal but raise interesting questions.
“I love being an independent artist. I haven’t known anything else, obviously, but I do really like the freedom and the control and just the agility that it affords me because I feel like we evolve so quickly as people and especially as artists. So I can come in one week and say, I wanna do this. And then two weeks later, I completely changed my mind and was able to make decisions and then execute them really quickly, because being independent, is really awesome,” she states.
Porter previously released her acclaimed debut project In My Head, which earned over ten million streams across platforms. She has garnered a loyal and massive following in recent years, with 320 thousand followers across all platforms and 50 million views on TikTok. The emerging artist has already earned accolades including being a TikTok Songwriter of the Year Nominee at the 2022 iHeart Radio Awards and CMT’s Next Up Now Artist for September 2022.
“It’s also crazy to me that the numbers are that high. I’m not a huge number person so hearing that I’m like, ‘Oh, wow, That was really doing well,’ and we’ve talked about that a lot among my team and my people. They’re like, ‘It’s so interesting that you decided that something that was really successful still wasn’t right for you,'” she adds.
