Our Play Irish Artist of the Week on Beat Breakfast is Jessica Hammond and her single 'Ugly'.
Belfast-based Jessica Hammond started her music career at 14 on Disney’s 'My Camp Rock' performing alongside Demi Lovato. She then went on to tour as a solo artist and recorded her debut album at aged 16 which received airplay on Northern Ireland's top radio stations including Cool FM & Citybeat.
Jessica has worked alongside some of the UK's best producers and Grammy award-winning writers, including Amy Wadge (Thinking Out Loud/Ed Sheeran) & Sandi Thom (I Wish I was a Punk Rocker) and Ollie Jacobs (The Saturdays) and after qualifying as an accomplished sound engineer, she went on to establish her own recording studio where she now works full time as an artist, writer and producer and in late 2019 decided to begin the process of releasing some more of her own music
Speaking of the track Jessica says: “Ugly is a song I wrote after dating someone for a short space of time, and whilst getting to know them, learning their personality was not very nice. The song is about dating someone who is very beautiful on the outside but ugly on the inside, this person was very insecure, unkind, disloyal, selfish and thought that because they had ‘Looks’ they could get away with anything. I feel it is a great empowerment song not just for girls but for guys also.”
Jessica concludes: “I want to create music that makes young girls and guys who mightn’t be the most confident feel empowered and strong like "a boss" so they feel like they can handle anything and like it doesn't matter if you don't fit in and its ok to be different.”
