“Dream Girl" Hailey Whitters is Finally Living The Dream in Her Very Own Way

It has been raining recognition for Nashville singer-songwriter Hailey Whitters in the past months. Her album “The Dream” which was released in February, kept popping up on the end of the year retrospect lists of reputable magazines and newspapers such as the New York Times “Best Albums of 2020”, the Washington Post’s “Best music of 2020”, NPR’s “The Best Music Of 2020: NPR Staff Picks”, Pitchfork’s “Great Records You May Have Missed” and her song “Janice From The Hotel Bar” was voted #25 in Rolling Stone Magazine’s “The best 50 songs of 2020”. Just this November People Magazine mentioned her as one of the top emerging artists.

These kinds of publications don’t offer mere reflections of how successful an album or song was in a year. It doesn’t matter how often this music got streamed to the journalists and writers reviewing it. These publications have been some of the most reputable sources of opinion on art and culture on the globe, some of them for centuries. If you’re on these lists, it means your art is considered to be of noticeable or even exceptional quality and substance. Hailey Whitters is such an exceptional singer and writer, with a piercing clear sounding voice as if a sister of Natalie Maines and pointing out as she says the “raw, real and imperfect” in her lyrics as opposed to the way things are expected of her, “I should be married by now”, she sings in her song “Heartland”.

Originally from Iowa, she moved to Nashville in her late teens and got on the treadmill like everybody else, waiting tables, writing hundreds of songs and hoping for the mayor label deal to materialize eventually. But it didn’t. Only 12 years later, after gathering the money from songs she wrote for the likes of Alan Jackson, Martina McBride and Little Big Town and finally self releasing her stunning compilation “The Dream” on her very own Pigasus Records did she find a deal that suited her artistic and personal independency and has been sky rocketing ever since. It is her mission to encourage other artists like her to realize that new ground is being broken in Nashville, you don’y need the old systems anymore and you can be successful by being exactly who you are after all. In her own words: "the way of releasing music and the way of making music is changing. I hope other artists are seeing this happen and realizing this is how it can be done.”