Interview: Jana Mila

Photo by Paul Bellaart

The young Dutch singer/songwriter Jana Mila’s debut album Chameleon is surprisingly mature sounding for someone of her age. As Mila shares her Disney-like fairy princess story, it’s obvious what her mentor heard in the music that inspired an invitation across the pond to Nashville to further explore her voice, meet like-minded musicians, and refine the sound that blends the gentle ruralness of Americana music with beautifully sunny Laurel Canyon melodies.

Earning frequent flier miles by traveling back and forth between Holland and the United States, Mila’s focused on sharing her music with receptive audiences while continuing to expand her music circle in the Country Music capital and beyond.

With a trip home shortly before Chameleon was released, Mila joined me for a conversation while taking a break from packing her suitcase for a flight the following morning. Understanding the importance of hitting the ground running, the singer plans to return to the U.S. shortly to perform at the AmericanaFest in Nashville and see where the road takes her from there.

We’re doing this interview on the eve of your return to Amsterdam, but you’ve been spending a lot of time in Nashville. Is Nashville starting to feel like home?

JANA: Yes. It’s funny though because it’s a lot different from what I’m used to in Amsterdam. For example, I do everything either by foot or by bike in Amsterdam. I don’t think that’s a good thing if you walk on the highway in Nashville. If you’re on a bike, you eventually come up on a highway. But, in Nashville, now I know all the spots. I know where the supermarket is and I know a nice place to eat so it feels like a home, and because we’ve been traveling the past couple of weeks – we’ve been doing a promotional tour here – we came back to Nashville every time. It starts feeling like home because you keep coming back to this familiar place. And this house I’ve been staying at is great. It’s like 10 times the size of what I have in Holland.

Have you experienced the touristy side of Nashville, like have you spent time on Broadway where there is bar after bar with stages in the front window and artists performing all day and all night?

JANA: When I first came to Nashville, I thought that I was going to like all the music there because it seemed like this sort of Disneyland of my taste. I thought that it would be all Americana or indie or whatever. And then I found out that there’s also a lot of crappy things going on here. So I went to Broadway a couple of times and it never lasts longer than an hour that I can hang out there. I did go to Robert’s Western World. That’s a really iconic bar where there’s this band with amazing musicians and I think they perform every night. They play country traditional songs and things like Johnny Cash and very popular songs.

The Nashville artists that I’ve spoken to have mentioned how much untapped talent exists there. Someone told me that the best guitar player they know is their mailman and that he just plays around town, has no dreams of leaving.

JANA: It has a bit of a romantic feeling when you think about it, like wherever you go. you will meet people that are trying to make it in the music industry. I met a lot of people here already and whenever I introduce myself, I’m like, “Yeah, I’m a songwriter,” and most people are like, “Ohy eah? So am I.”

The Nashville music scene that you are part of is also known for its sense of community. Have you found “your people”?

JANA: I think that I got a lot of help finding people because there’s someone in Holland called Ilse DeLange. She’s the person who introduced me to Nashville. She has a house here and she recorded her record here 20 years ago so she already knew a lot of people. And she also had band members who lived here. She really took me into the scene and that was her plan for the first trip. She was like, “We’re just gonna hang out with songwriters and I want you to feel at home there and to meet people and connect with other songwriters because it’s hard.”

I think it’s hard if you come here out of the blue with your guitar in hand and you’re like, “Hey, where is everyone? Who wants to do something with me?” Ilse introduced me to people and I feel like I’ve built this group of people that keeps expanding with people I’d like to work with. For example, Todd Lombardo, who is the producer of my album, is someone that I write with and he will always know someone else who would be nice to add to the session. And I know a couple of songwriters here, Matthew Crosby and Jake Etheridge, who became friends that I hang out with on a regular basis. I feel like I could meet a lot more people. Hopefully, at Americana Fest when I play there in a couple of weeks, that will be a whole pile of people and everyone will go to the same spot. I really hope that I get to do some networking or that I just get to meet more people because it would be nice to expand that bubble that I have.

I am not a huge superhero movie kind of watcher but in those movies, superheroes always have an origin story that explains how they became who they are. What is your origin story?

JANA: Everything happened really fast. And I always say that before I got a chance to choose music, music chose me. I wasn’t even ready to commit to something back in the day when all of this happened. I started writing songs when I was 16. I grew up in a house where my entire family made music to the point that I was actually annoyed by it and I wanted to rebel against it. I was like, “You guys are all making music so I’m gonna be a history teacher.”

I had been writing stories for a long time because I really wanted to write a book, but I kept on starting a book and then never finishing it because there was not enough patience. When I first grabbed a guitar, my mom was really encouraging because she was like, “Wow, so you do like music! So you do want to do something with music!” Then she found this girl that was, I think, 10 years older than me, who started teaching me a couple of songs that I was listening to, just a couple of chords. I never really had the discipline to actually learn the songs that I had to learn, but I started writing immediately.

One of the first songs I wrote was “Rosie,” which is on the album. I played that song during a contest when I was 16. I was pretty shy about it at first. I was at a school that was very into art and I had a music teacher who really liked it when people made their own stuff. He signed me up for the contest, I didn’t sign myself up. I couldn’t really bail out of it, so I was like, “I’ll just play that song in front of people and if I don’t like it, and if I feel like this is not my thing, then I’ll stop immediately.”

That ended up being recorded, someone filmed it. and it ended up on YouTube. Ilsa, who is a big artist in Holland, she’s one of the most famous singers in Holland, she picked up on that, and she started following me, and I didn’t even know. It’s sort of the cliche fairy tale thing for an artist; you put out something and then there is someone who really believes in it.

I discovered I really like performing, because it’s way easier to put your stories into songs, because you can write every day, you don’t have to write an entire book. You can put all your ideas in songs and I like that it creates a lot of different meanings when people listen to it. Everyone has their own interpretation, and it creates a conversation. You can connect with other people and it just makes you feel less weird about yourself because you write something that’s maybe very vulnerable, and then someone will come up to you and be like, “I totally feel like that too” or “You really touched me because this has been going on in my life.”

Ilsa sent me a text through WhatsApp. I thought that I was being catfished – I thought one of my friends was faking to be this big artist from Holland. She asked me if I wanted to grab a coffee and said she was really curious about the rest of my music. “I really like what I saw on YouTube and I want to know what your future plans are.” One week later, we were having coffee. One of the first things she said was, “I really want to take you to Nashville because I think that your music really fits there and there will be more people that understand your music.” I was 17 or 18 when this happened. I think that might be the Superman story of how it all began. I think I would be way too shy to send all my music to record labels and knock on people’s doors and be like, “Hey, listen to this.” I wasn’t at that point yet. I was still in the baby steps of being a musician. I didn’t even call myself a musician. I just wrote a couple songs. Maybe I wanted to be a film director. Maybe I wanted to be a history teacher. I didn’t think about everything that could happen when you take those steps. That’s where it all began.

When Ilsa said she wanted to take you to Nashville, did you even know what that was?

JANA: I had no idea. I knew that there were a bunch of great songwriters over there and I knew that a lot of artists that I really like bought houses in Nashville. But I didn’t really know that it was the heart of Americana and folk music and you breathe music when you came here. I had never been to the U.S. before I went to Nashville so I had no idea. It seems so far away because I was not even thinking about how to navigate through the Netherlands yet. I was still in this small room with my music so it seemed like it was a fairy tale that someone would say, “You need to go across the ocean.”

I didn’t really understand what it meant but I knew that she recorded her album there and that was a big thing in Holland. People were like, “Wow, she’s recording her album in Nashville. She’s doing great.” I really had to find out about it for myself because it sort of seemed like Disneyland. It was like a dream.

As a new songwriter, when you were writing “Rosie,” were you trying to emulate the kind of music you were listening to?

JANA: Around that time, there were a lot of things that I started listening to. I started listening to James Taylor and to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and Simon and Garfunkel, Melanie, all these ‘70s artists. I found it really inspiring how people put their storylines into lyrics and put fiction into their lyrics as well. It was all part of who they were – imagination meets real life.

When I wrote “Rosie,” I wasn’t really planning on sounding like something but now when I look back on it, I think I was kind of inspired by the song “She’s Leaving Home” from the Beatles because that has this scenario of this empty house and of her purse still being there, the bedsheets are crumpled, but she’s not there anymore. It’s about someone who’s trying to understand what happened. That’s how I imagined “Rosie,” she was this mysterious girl who just decided to leave one day. It’s all about being lonely and trying to find company within yourself. If you can’t find the company within yourself, it’s going to be really hard to receive love from others. The person singing this song offers the perspective of a family who’s trying to explain to Rosie that whatever went on, they are still here for her. But, if you don’t believe that, you first need to understand that you can love yourself. I thought it was a very romantic song, but it was also about grief. I got inspired by the Beatles song, but “Rosie” doesn’t sound anything like that song. I’m not sure if there was any artist that I was holding on to, like, “I want to sound like this or that,” but I got inspired by the storytelling of different artists.

When you were 16 and writing that song, did you understand how mature your lyrics were?

JANA: That’s definitely how I look back on it. But when I was 16, I already had a lot of thoughts about stuff. I was constantly thinking and that made it even harder to be a teenager because you try to understand your own mind sometimes and you try to not feel like a stranger. Sometimes you can be so much in your own head that you feel like you’re the only person experiencing certain things. I understand now that that’s not the case, there’s way more people that go through what you go through, but when I wrote that song, I felt like I was like a stranger, like I was an alien at that point. I used to say that “Rosie” was about someone else, but it was actually about me. I was trying to put my story into the song without other people noticing that I was basically writing about myself and that’s how I made up the character Rosie.

Did you enjoy going to school or were you the type of student who was like, “I can’t wait to get out of this place”?

JANA: Hitting puberty wasn’t my prime time. I think that’s true for most people. I went to an art school so that made it a bit easier because there were a lot of people who were expressing themselves but there were also a lot of extroverted people there. I feel like I am in the middle of that. I’m sort of an extroverted introverted person. Back in the day, I felt like I sometimes had a hard time feeling connected to others and I also felt like there was a camera on me, like every movement that I made, people were watching, and they thought it was weird.

I was trying to find my identity back then. I changed a lot within my identity. I’m blonde now, but back then I colored my hair platinum blonde and I wore a fur coat. Now, I’m a vegetarian. I just wanted to fit in with this group of girls that I felt had a very strong position because then it made me feel like I was more in control and at least I had this force around me.

Hmm … sounds like you were being a chameleon. That makes me wonder where your album title came from (laughs).

JANA: It symbolizes the effort of trying to fit in with other people while you’re still struggling to find your own identity. If you don’t really know who you are, fitting in with other people is a very hard quest. That’s what I was going through during high school. I was constantly changing to meet other people’s expectations but, at the same time, I was very unsure of who I really was. I was just way too busy with the perspective of other people. It’s about how you refer to yourself to other people and how you compare yourself to other people. I felt like everyone around me had it figured out except for me and I think I felt a bit lonely even though I had really nice friends. I don’t think I was an outcast but I was constantly contemplating everything about myself.

If you’re a teenager, maybe you really, really want to have a certain personality because it makes you feel like you are part of something. Now that I’m older, I feel like I’m a different person every day and that’s not a bad thing. I don’t have to hold on to something and I don’t need this package of traits. This is who I am. When I was younger, I felt like I needed to be something so people would see that person all the time.

It sounds like if we were to go back in time 10 years and tell you about the person you’d be in 2024, you might be shocked and surprised. And I know that you said you’re evolving every day, growing and learning. Do you think that you’ve found who you are as an artist or do you think it’s possible your next album might sound totally different?

JANA: I kept calling my music Americana, but it’s definitely not what this album is. It’s more like indie pop. And maybe I will never write a song like “Rosie” again. The things that I write now feel like they are exactly the way that I want to express myself at this point in time. If I like it, that’s enough for me. I don’t have to think about the genre, the genre is me. Whatever I bring into the world, that’s going to be the genre, because I thought about it too much in the beginning, and people really want to put you into a category.

I’m a big fan of people like Sabrina Carpenter, for example, and I think that her way of songwriting is really cool. I’m not shying away from having more of a pop sound. And even if you feel like you write a song that doesn’t fit that expectation, the way you produce it is also a huge thing, because the songs on the album sounded a lot different when I recorded the demo version. When we went into the studio, that’s where they found their form and how they sort of evolved into being the song that they are now.

I think that it’s a good thing that, as an artist, you’re not afraid of change and you’re not afraid of being confronted by who you are. As a person, you can change so your songs can also change. If you are really holding on to one thing, then you will probably not enjoy singing it on stage, because you need to feel like that is who you are at that point. Even though a couple of these songs were written 10 years ago, I did decide to put them on the album, because they still felt like me.

While you wrote some of those songs 10 years ago, do the versions of those songs on the album sound like what you wrote or have they been changed over time? Would the teenager who wrote those songs recognize them today?

JANA: That’s a good question. The song “Somebody New” is one that sounds extremely different. I wrote the little melody that is in the song, it was already there. But that song was intended to be more sad when I wrote it. And then it turned into the most up-tempo song of the album. It’s funny how someone can listen to it, soak it up, and then be like, “This could be so cool if it was 10 BPM faster and if it has these tough sounding guitar lines.” After thinking about it, I was like, “Yeah, you’re absolutely right.” You can still sing about the same thing and have the same story but it could feel totally different. When I go back and listen to the demo, I’m happy that we didn’t do it that way, it would have been one of those sad songs about struggles in a relationship. Now you have to listen to the lyrics to find out that it’s sort of bittersweet.

When I write songs, I write them with the guitar and record them most of the time with my phone. I’m not really someone who gets demo-itis where you make a demo and you’re so excited by your own arrangement that all the other arrangements feel like they won’t fit anymore. I always leave it really open, The only thing that I do is maybe have a bit more feel in the guitar. Todd Lombardo was an extension of the song. He wasn’t really changing it, he was adding something to it, something that maybe wasn’t there yet.

You said you grew up listening to some classic artists but you’re also of the MP3 generation. What is more exciting to you – being able to hold your record in your hand or being able to send a link to the album stream to friends and family to check out?

JANA: I like to have something physical in my hands. You can open it, you can read all the lyrics. If people stream the songs, most of the time they don’t even look up who the artist is that’s performing it. They just listen to the song and then skip to the next one. And they don’t follow the order of the songs. They don’t follow the exact order of how you intended it to be heard. The album is a story, it has a certain chronological order. You need to hear the whole thing, not just zoom in on one song and then go to another artist because listening to the whole album is a way better experience. I really like to hand someone the entire piece and say, “This is my craft. It’s one big thing, it’s not separate.” But, I still need to buy a very good record player. I don’t have one. My friends are really into record players and even cassettes are sort of coming back. People want to go back to that.

There is certain album artwork that you have to look at for a long time and think how it fits the songs and the story that is being told. It’s different than just throwing one song out there. Hopefully people will try to find out more about who you are as a person. Every time someone is looking at an LP, they’re like, “That’s the person” or “That’s the story” or “The album has a background story.” That makes more sense then just going into an algorithm.

Do you have a music career in Holland? Are there people there now saying, “She went to Nashville to make a record”?

JANA: Well, people definitely know what I’m doing. I studied at the conservatory of Amsterdam and a lot of people that were in my class are performing in Holland. My career in Holland is going pretty well but I feel like it’s going better in the U.S. right now. I still do like when I go back to Amsterdam, I’m going to do a couple of interviews there because people really want to hear what this tour has been about.

The tour you’re talking about was a promotional tour you did in advance of the release of the album. You stopped in at a lot of radio stations across the country. Did it seem like work or was it all worthwhile?

JANA: It was definitely worthwhile because while we were on this radio trip, my song went into the Billboard charts. When people see a face connected to the music, they will not forget about you as fast and they get a feeling of who you are. And, by performing at the stations, they could hear the songs live and see us talking in front of people. When I was in Holland, it felt like everything that has been going on in the U.S. wasn’t real. I knew that my songs were on the radio but I never heard them myself. I was not connected to the audience yet because there were no actual faces. Playing in Holland, there are sometimes some of the same people in the crowd so I know who might be in the audience and what type of people they are. In the U.S., I had no idea. It has been a lot of fun because I’m traveling with my keys player and my guitar player from home. I’m happy that I brought something from home because I do like to have something familiar with me. It’s not that I get homesick but I like it when there’s just a little piece of Holland somewhere around me.

We had a lot of fun because we not only got to play but we also got to see the entire country. We went to 15 states in five weeks, that’s more than maybe some people in the U.S. have ever seen. We got some free days also so we got to see the places. Sometimes you’re in a car, and then you go to a station and then you go to the plane and the only thing you saw was the highway or the inside of a station. People have been very, very welcoming. And it’s really cool to meet people who know my songs, even though I haven’t even been here for most of the time. It feels really special.

I think when I go back to Holland, people are very interested in this whole experience. They want to know what happened on the road or what it is like to perform at these stations. There’s a lot of love for the type of music that I make here.

Is there any place in the U.S. that felt a little bit like home to you?

JANA: There were a couple cities that I felt like there were people biking a lot. For example, Philadelphia was very calm and very serene. I also really liked Minneapolis because you could walk there very easily, and it felt safe to be on the streets. I think most of the cities that I went to, they’re all so different from each other that you could find a piece of home everywhere, but it’s all still very different from Amsterdam, because it’s just very big. I tend to like places with more green and more bike lanes and family-friendly suburbs and stuff. I mean, I love New York, but it was also very intense for me.

And you’ll be coming back to play AmericanaFest in September. Any other tour plans?

JANA: When we go to AmericanaFest, we’re actually going to extend a bit of the radio tour. We’re going to be performing, I think, in San Francisco, a couple more places. We’re probably going to be in the U.S. for three weeks. A lot has been going on. When you are in the country, it’s easier to really feel that momentum of your album coming out. The label is really trying to keep me here because if you’re not here, it’s a lot harder. So, we’re going to come back in September and then after that we might come back in November as well, we might do a support tour for someone.

While we were doing the radio tour, we got really tight as musicians and we don’t want to have a gap where we’re not playing for a long time. If we go back to Holland, it could happen that we get busy with other things and other priorities and we sort of forget things so I really hope that when we come back, more stuff will happen. But, that’s the music thing. You have no control over what could happen so you just have to wait and see.